The first shot shows students descending a staircase in calm, orderly fashion, then the second details the same action as a chaotic rush.
An assignment from Iran’s Ministry of Education, this documentary from the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty includes interviews with officials who predictably praise teaching as a sacred, noble, and honorable profession.
Though much of this film is a straightforward lecture on dental hygiene delivered by a dentist facing the camera, it still manages to be persuasively Kiarostami-esque in its description of young Mohammad-Reza’s life at home and at school before he falls prey to tooth woes.
Ostensibly a film for children, this picture book essay about the range of hues that brighten our world has the air of a delightfully playful formalistic exercise.
This simple moral tale seems to prefigure Where Is the Friend’s House? Two young schoolboys, Dara and Nader, are friends until Dara returns Nader’s notebook torn and Nader retaliates in kind, setting off an escalating battle that leads to destruction of property and physical injury.
The first of Kiarostami’s films made for, rather than about, children was an experiment in combining live action and animation, done in collaboration with animator Nafiseh Riahi.
A little boy makes his way home clutching a loaf of bread. In an alley, a stray dog blocks his path.
“The mother of all my films.”
Abbas Kiarostami
The faces of a hundred and fourteen famous Iranian actresses and French star Juliette Binoche as they watch a filmed adaptation of a tragic twelfth-century romance by Nezami Ganjavi in a movie theater.
Kiarostami takes meta-narrative gamesmanship to masterful new heights in the final installment of his celebrated Koker trilogy.
In June 1990, an earthquake of catastrophic proportions struck Northern Iran, killing tens of thousands of people and causing untold damage.
Based upon a peculiar news story Kiarostami stumbled upon, the film follows an unemployed youth from Teheran called Hossein Sabzian, as he convinces an entire family that he is the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
An Iranian man drives his car in search of someone who will quietly bury him under a cherry tree after he commits suicide.
“Death is part of life, instead of making life part of (or parted from) something other than itself.
“For decades, classical film theory pondered on the appropriate metaphor to explain the screen: a window or a frame? Was the screen a window on the world, therefore reality captured, or, a frame, reality constructed, a painting and its frame?
Eight-year-old Ahmed has mistakenly taken his friend Mohammad’s notebook. He wants to return it, or else his friend will be expelled from school. The boy determinedly sets out to find Mohammad’s home in the neighbouring village.
