Empty Your Pockets: Compassion and Rule in Tense Airport Drama

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.

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.

Yet, as the film courses on, his earnestness begins to fail him. Too helpful, too green, too tired to uphold the rules with their ideal rigidity. He volunteers to assist an ailing old man (Bahman Dadui), as old and ailing as his mother (Farshideh Nasrin) at home. It rubs his superiors the wrong way, he comes perilously close to earning their displeasure.

The narrative is divided into mini episodes that flow into one another. There’s the old man who is separated from his daughter (Leyla Shamshiri) and granddaughter (Nikta Atapour). While he becomes part of an absurd debate (preceded by a rather heavy-handed shot of The Trial) over whether or not an ant statue qualifies as art, his family are involved in a moment of communal care. These moments are sprinkled through the film as keys to other, wider stories, packed into bags to make it through the brief runtime.

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.

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.

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.

Hassan remains an intriguing character to the end. A cog in the wheel whose sentience threatens the promise of security, his dilemma should be recognisable in just about any viewer who is faced with the choice between paying the bills and doing the right thing. Just now, the stakes involved are higher than ever.

Watch Empty Your Pockets Short Film Trailer