Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.
The movie focuses on one of the events in Zendegi Edame Darad (1992), and explores the relationship between the movie director, and the actors. The local actors play a couple who got ... See full summary »
Director:
Abbas Kiarostami
Stars:
Mohamad Ali Keshavarz,
Farhad Kheradmand,
Zarifeh Shiva
In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged British writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano. While there, a chance question reveals something deeper.
Director:
Abbas Kiarostami
Stars:
Juliette Binoche,
William Shimell,
Jean-Claude Carrière
A hundred and fourteen famous Iranian theater and cinema actresses and a French star: mute spectators at a theatrical representation of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian poem from the twelfth ... See full summary »
In this documentary, Kiarostami asks a number of students about their school homework. The answers of some children shows the darker side of this method of education.
Director:
Abbas Kiarostami
Stars:
Babak Ahmadpoor,
Farhang Akhavan,
Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh
A grade-school-age boy, neglected by his parents, lies, cheats, and steals to accumulate enough money to afford a bus ride to a large city and a ticket to see his favorite soccer team play.
The movie revolves around the life of a tax collector who is accused of taking bribes, and also has to deal with problems at home, including the suicide attempt of his wife.
Director:
Abbas Kiarostami
Stars:
Shohreh Aghdashloo,
Kurosh Afsharpanah,
Mehdi Montazar
Five sequences : 1) A piece of driftwood on the seashore, carried about by the waves 2) People walking on the seashore. The oldest ones stop by, look at the sea, then go away 3) Blurry ... See full summary »
Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.
Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider. See more »
Goofs
When the engineer is driving back from the mountain,
he stops and picks up someone who is walking down
the road and starts talking to him, but when the
camera shows the car from long shot for the first
time, there is no one in the car other than the
engineer. See more »
Another user who reviewed the film speaks of a film so full of 'symbolism' that he couldn't grasp. Maybe because it wasn't there? I'm generally not a fan of minimalism but Kiarostami grips me like no one else. I went out to take the trash after watching this and everything around me felt more alive, the nightsky, moon, trees blowing in the wind, I experienced all this in expansive vivid detail like new life was breathed into them. This is what a Kiarostami film does to me. It's about the sights and sounds of a life simple and profound in that simplicity, profound in the stoic sense of an old man sitting down in the same place every day to sip his tea. The wisdom here is not one of tremendous insight into something we didn't know, but a remembrance of something we knew and have forgotten and need to listen as the wind carries it back. Maybe the next world is beautiful muses a country doctor to our protagonist as they cross golden fields of wheat blowing in the wind, but no one has come back to tell us, so the present world is all we have; and how beautiful it is.
Beautiful Persian Zen.
The film is about waiting for something to happen, waiting for the death of an old woman which an engineer from Tehran and two of his associates have come to document; waiting for a narrative. Every now and then the engineer's cell phone rings, he has poor signal so he must rush to his car and drive to a nearby hill to get good signal. On top of the rocky hill there's a man digging a ditch, sight unseen, and the engineer idly chats with him down in his hole. That man digs up a thigh bone that once belonged to someone, the cemetery of the nearby village is on that hill, and throws it up to our curious protagonist. He stores it away in his car, a symbol of life come and gone. In the end he throws it down a creek and we see the old fickle bone flow down the water. All the symbolism in the film speaks for itself. Trees lush green and fields yellow golden with wheat and a hot dusty wind blowing over this.
I have great admiration for the way Kiarostami makes films. He's so open to the filmmaking process, no strings attached, script, rehearsal, staging, all the mechanics subordinate to the real deal. It takes balls to go into this with as little safeguards. A lot of the film seems to have been improvised on the spot, in that small Iranian village, the faces are real, their casual chitchat the casual chitchat of real people. Take him or leave him, not a lot of people can make films the way he does and make them good.
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Another user who reviewed the film speaks of a film so full of 'symbolism' that he couldn't grasp. Maybe because it wasn't there? I'm generally not a fan of minimalism but Kiarostami grips me like no one else. I went out to take the trash after watching this and everything around me felt more alive, the nightsky, moon, trees blowing in the wind, I experienced all this in expansive vivid detail like new life was breathed into them. This is what a Kiarostami film does to me. It's about the sights and sounds of a life simple and profound in that simplicity, profound in the stoic sense of an old man sitting down in the same place every day to sip his tea. The wisdom here is not one of tremendous insight into something we didn't know, but a remembrance of something we knew and have forgotten and need to listen as the wind carries it back. Maybe the next world is beautiful muses a country doctor to our protagonist as they cross golden fields of wheat blowing in the wind, but no one has come back to tell us, so the present world is all we have; and how beautiful it is.
Beautiful Persian Zen.
The film is about waiting for something to happen, waiting for the death of an old woman which an engineer from Tehran and two of his associates have come to document; waiting for a narrative. Every now and then the engineer's cell phone rings, he has poor signal so he must rush to his car and drive to a nearby hill to get good signal. On top of the rocky hill there's a man digging a ditch, sight unseen, and the engineer idly chats with him down in his hole. That man digs up a thigh bone that once belonged to someone, the cemetery of the nearby village is on that hill, and throws it up to our curious protagonist. He stores it away in his car, a symbol of life come and gone. In the end he throws it down a creek and we see the old fickle bone flow down the water. All the symbolism in the film speaks for itself. Trees lush green and fields yellow golden with wheat and a hot dusty wind blowing over this.
I have great admiration for the way Kiarostami makes films. He's so open to the filmmaking process, no strings attached, script, rehearsal, staging, all the mechanics subordinate to the real deal. It takes balls to go into this with as little safeguards. A lot of the film seems to have been improvised on the spot, in that small Iranian village, the faces are real, their casual chitchat the casual chitchat of real people. Take him or leave him, not a lot of people can make films the way he does and make them good.