Reza Mir-Karimi surprised and delighted everyone last year with his charming but unsentimental feature debut, The Child and the Soldier. He returns with the even more accomplished and poetic Under the Moonlight. It is a visually stunning, masterfully understated account of a very controversial subject. A young seminarian, Seyyed Hassan, who is reluctant to don the religious garb, goes through a life-transforming experience after a package containing the fabric for his graduation robe and turban is stolen by a teenage street hustler. In his pursuit to recover his belongings, Seyyed Hassan discovers a land of forgotten souls living on the margins of Tehran under a bridge. These people whose tenuous existence is a daily struggle in an almost Dostoevskian fashion reawaken a compassion for humanity in Seyyed Hassan, which his theological training had failed to do: how can he justify his faith in view of so much social injustice? In a fashion similar to the young Mifune in search of his stolen gun in Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1947), a personal material loss is transcended into a spiritual gain.