EMPTY YOUR POCKETS Review in Indie Short Mag
Indie Shorts Mag has given 4.7 stars to Empty Your Pockets. Some excerpts below, and you can click here to read the full review.
“Tara Aghdashloo’s 20-minute Empty Your Pockets is a bleak drama set within the bureaucratic maze of an airport. Set against the backdrop of escalating, large-scale poverty, it sees a day in the life of Hassan, new and eager at his customs job. He balances zealous rigour with the vulnerability of a family in need; the conflict it arouses in the character is made abundantly visible in the figure of its actor, Kiarash Dadgar.”
About Hassan:
“Diligent in the wrong place, Hassan is initially the good-natured face of those whose defense in the face of a quivering mountain of sins is that they were only doing their job. Every ambiguous item on his conveyor belt brings out the rules and regulations tome, he peruses with amusingly nervous diligence. He is only trying to do his job.”
About the ant metaphor and screenplay:
“The ant debate is the film’s centerpiece. Questioned over the piece, its owner (Armin Lou) explains its background. The tone shifts from timid supplication to the alluring whisper of a morbid fairytale. The music changes. And then abruptly, the spell is broken, disdain permeates the scene, the storyteller is once again reduced to pleading and diffidence. The higher-ups walk in. Sarvan (Peyman Shariati) confuses the ant—in every way an ant—for a cockroach. It is a beautiful turn of the writing; the overlords see the neat subtext of a bluntly obvious work. Art, indeed.”
About the cinematography:
“The cinematography amplifies the claustrophobic plainness in the set design with its tight 4:3 aspect ratio, stark lighting, lines everywhere—the walls wield their ability to close in on you as a threat. They loom over you, and you have nothing else to look at. The authorities line the walls and the anonymous masses obediently glide in and out of the frame like items on a conveyor belt. The neatness is stultifying.”
About the themes and sound design:
“There is an overarching feeling of frustration—undermined by those other gestures of compassion—enveloping within it an omnipresent dread. It climaxes in the penultimate scene of the film when lowly Hassan ends up in the exclusive office of his superior with a ziplock bag of teeth. To someone underexposed to life in Iran and familiar with WWII dramas, it looks like something out of a holocaust film. In Sarvan’s expansive office, the sound of revving wheels contrasts against the near complete stillness of the surroundings. It evokes something unsettling, nearly terrifying, like the whirring of a dentist’s tool. An uncannily astute moment for which credit must go to the sound designer.