PlayBack

Shut indoors during lockdown, a man and a woman invent a game to pass the time: they play at being husband and wife. The routine comes easily at first, a small private theater of domestic life. Then they trade places, each taking on the other's role, and the game begins to reveal things about gender, power and expectation that neither had put into words. Written and directed by Pouya Aghelizadeh, this 14-minute Iranian short features Shiva Shabani, Mehdi Saffari, Raha Pourrahmati, Hasti Babayi and Farnaz Hosseinmardi. Using the confined space of a lockdown apartment, PlayBack builds a tense, layered chamber drama in which performance and identity start to blur, and it leaves viewers asking who we become when the parts we are given stop fitting.