Black Rabbit, White Rabbit

Black Rabbit, White Rabbit begins with an instantly recognisable scenario: a film armourer suspects that a prop gun is real. From there, Shahram Mokri threads together three seemingly unconnected narratives – Sara, an injured woman (Hasti Mohammai) convinced her car crash was no accident; a courier (Babak Karimi) trying to deliver a package to a mysterious director; and an aspiring actress (Kibriyo Dilyobova) trying to get an audition. Scenes recur at slightly different angles; conversations double back on themselves; the same moment seems to exist across multiple timelines.

The story centres on a remake of Iranian epic historical drama Hezar Dastan (1987). Within the busy production, a scene in which a veiled assassin prepares to shoot a speaker unfolds – the line between performance and reality collapses as events on set begin to take on a life of their own. The echo of Halyna Hutchins’s tragic death on the set of Rust (2024) lingers over the film, carrying a faint hint of poor taste – a stark reminder that on-set events can all too easily spill into real life.

As the film progresses, Sara wanders between the set and her home, wrapped in white bandages and shadowed by fragmented memories. Mokri’s long takes and fluid handheld camerawork create an eerie intimacy: the camera moves through the unstable environment of the set and the characters’ lives, constantly blurring the line between performance and reality. The loose, behind-the-scenes style and the aspiring actress’s tumultuous on-set experiences capture a kind of filmmaking rarely seen in Hollywood. The camera never quite stops watching the precarious, shifting world of the set and those caught inside it. Mokri uses this openness to let genres bleed together – noir, absurdist comedy, ghost story, thriller and meta-mystery – all unfolding within a single, continuous space. 

At times, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit may leave audiences lost, even frustrated, but that confusion feels deliberate. Mokri isn’t chasing coherence so much as tracing the ways stories collapse under their own weight, rewriting one another in ways no camera can fully capture.

Christina Yang

Black Rabbit, White Rabbit does not have a release date yet.

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Watch the trailer for Black Rabbit, White Rabbit here: