Taken from the June 2012 issue of Dazed & Confused:

Director Mark Cousins has spent the last six years traveling the globe to make 
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, a colossal 15-hour history of innovation in cinema. He has chosen one of the films he discovered along the way for our Cult Vault – Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1996 Iranian film A Moment of Innocence: 



“As a student radical, Makhmalbaf stabbed and injured a policeman. Decades later, the filmmaker advertised for extras for his new movie. One of the people who showed up was... the policeman he stabbed. Intrigued, Makhmalbaf abandoned the planned film and, instead, made a movie with the policeman about the stabbing. The result is funny and intellectually bracing, about memory and truth. Plus it contains, at its heart, a very moving revelation... it’s a masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made.”