PlayBack

Locked down together in quarantine, a man and a woman pass the time with a game: they play husband and wife. The roles come easily at first, a private theater of domestic routine. Then they swap, each stepping into the other's part, and what began as play starts to expose truths about gender, power and desire that neither had said aloud. Pouya Aghelizadeh's fifteen-minute Iranian short, featuring Shiva Shabani, Mehdi Saffari, Raha Pourrahmati, Hasti Babayi and Farnaz Hosseinmardi, uses the claustrophobia of the pandemic apartment to build a tense, layered chamber piece in which performance and identity blur. Made in a country where such questions are rarely put on screen, PlayBack is both a quiet thriller and a coded meditation on who we are when the roles we are handed no longer fit.