Townspeople in the mountains: Four men return home from a ski trip. In the middle of this inhospitable area they perceive a massive stone. A huge boulder, which should nonetheless be controllable by joining forces. On a sporty whim, they come up with the puerile idea to move the stone. After all, that shouldn’t be a problem for big guys like them. But it is a problem. The whopper won’t budge, no matter how hard they try. Their ambition gets bigger and bigger, even when not even the force of a donkey can deal with this problem and more and more people (have to) join in their laborious efforts.
In his first masterpiece, Haghighi demonstrates his very idiosyncratic passion for the absurd, situated somewhere between Kafka and Beckett. What the hell is all this madness about the stone good for? What moves the men, what do they want to move? Of course there is the political allegory at its center, it is after all the “year one” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But it cannot be this alone. Somehow, you suspect that this stone will stick in your mind for a long time to come, no matter what sociopolitical system you happen to live in…
