Fellow Citizen

An endless array of bossy citizens bombard a poor traffic policeman with all the excuses and reasons why they (but no one else) should be allowed into a restricted area in Kiarostami’s satiric document of humanity’s seemingly endless capacity for lying through its teeth—that is, telling stories. Kiarostami uses a telephoto lens to eavesdrop on the action, fashioning out of one traffic panic an experimental, Warholian study (culled from nearly eighteen hours of continuous footage) of verbal invention, miniature rebellion, and the fine line between order and disorder.