Considering the recent surge in that hybrid TV form the docu-soap, you might think we'd be sceptical about the supposed separateness of filmed reality and fiction. Yet at heart we're still so convinced that drama is drama and documentary is unmediated reality that it hits us like a bomb when we learn that documentary may not be showing us the whole truth - as in the scandal over The Connection, the Carlton drug-running report recently exposed as riddled with deceptions.
In Iranian cinema, documentary and fiction have a much more equitable relationship; as some recent films suggest, they are just two different routes for getting to the truth. Reality may not necessarily be whatever is in front of the camera. It can also be what evades the camera, and therefore has to be reconstructed, evoked - for want of a better word, faked.
Abbas Kiarostami's 1989 film Close-Up, released here last year, was about a real-life case involving a fellow Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. An unemployed man had passed himself off as Makhmalbaf and led a credulous family to believe that he would cast them in his next film. The case went to court where the accused was acquitted of fraud on the grounds that his imposture was motivated by a genuine, morally serious love of cinema. Kiarostami recreated the story as docu- fiction, in which the accused and the family re-enacted their own roles.
In a film about pretense and appearance, you were never entirely sure what, or who, was real, what was performed. But through this perplexing construction, Kiarostami at once interrogated the nature of cinematic truth and allowed accusers and accused to settle their differences through the reconciling medium of cinema. Close-Up represented something we can't quite imagine in the west - a sort of judicial cinema in which wrongs are publicly righted. Related, but diametrically opposed, to the hysterical pillorying on The Jerry Springer Show, it restores dignity to the public and to the medium.
In Makhmalbaf's own A Moment of Innocence, recently released here, the director himself is the subject for redemption, having stabbed a young policeman during the Shah's reign. Twenty years on, the policeman and Makhmalbaf unite to shoot an account of the incident, which is recreated, and transformed, in an eloquent closing freeze-frame - a device which is one of the defining rhetorical trademarks of new Iranian cinema.
The latest example of cinema as courtroom is The Apple, by Samira Makhmalbaf, the 18-year-old daughter of Mohsen, who wrote and edited it. The Apple is a true story (this term is used with caution) about two 11-year-old girls, Zahra and Massoumeh, living in poverty with their father and blind mother in Tehran. The parents have never let the girls set foot in the street, until their neighbours at last alert the welfare department, which intervenes to restore the children to the world.
A documentary sequence on video recounts the family's first encounter with the world and the camera - the children have reporters' microphones thrust into their faces and respond with inchoate mutters and inscrutable grins. We can't be sure that their video verite isn't as much a set-up as the rest of the film. But it marks the highly staged sequences that follow as a vivid fiction, and by contrast gives them the heightened quality of a public reckoning.
As the girls step into the world, the camera hovers over them like a solicitous nanny. Strangers both to words and to the freedom of body language, the girls hobble up and down the street with furious intent, grinning conspiratorially and homing in on the trouble they've always been kept away from - they immediately waylay a young ice-cream vendor and feed his wares to a goat. In a wonderful sequence, they meet a crisply bossy little girl who decides that the best way to socialise them is to take them shopping for watches.
It's impossible not to respond to Zahra and Massoumeh as screen naturals, vigorously anarchic spirits who seem to blossom as the film unravels. Rather than being exploitative, the film seems to be giving them their overdue day in the sun. But it's clear that their father is less comfortable, aware that he's being tried by both the camera and the daily press, which he scans with horror. Here the film's courtroom function is seen at its harshest, although he seems to submit to it willingly as a force of moral authority.
But what's also on trial, by extension, is Iranian society and women's role within it. The girls' prison has its parallel in the veil that their mother - invisible under her own chador - claps on them the minute they're reunited. The father quotes the dictum "A girl is like a flower - if the sun shines on her, she will fade", but The Apple proposes itself as a rescue operation for those who fade in darkness.
Another of the startling final freeze-frames suggests that another family member has been brought into the light - Iranian cinema is bold with symbolism that might seem heavy-handed in any other context. The Apple is not only one of the most entertaining films of the year, but also one of the most serious - a profession of faith that the intermingling of documentary and drama can produce something truer and more complex than straight reality, and can perhaps change the shape of the world, too.
"The Apple" (PG) opens 27 December at the Renoir and Metro cinemas, London, and selected cinemas nationwide
