Variety Review :
Though his name continues to pop up regularly as writer or story man on a good chunk of Iranian cinema, Abbas Kiarostami himself has not filmed anything even vaguely commercial since 2002’s “Ten.” The maestro has disappeared into making more abstract, experimental installations, theater pieces and films (“Five”). His latest, “Shirin,” wherein 112 Iranian actresses and Juliette Binoche are shot watching a 12th-century Persian play, with the play’s performance itself kept entirely offscreen, is unlikely to pack ’em in. Yet “Shirin” offers a feast for the bedazzled eye and a crash course in narrative obsession for the benumbed mind.Read More »

This banned and rarely seen pseudo-documentary by Kiarostami is a testimony to his seldom acknowledged political shrewdness and his objective, complex perspective on the tumultuous events of the late 70s in Iran, culminating in the revolution. Remarkably, he achieved this without leaving his comfort zone, the classroom setting, and by staying faithful to his inquiring style, with its subtle, imaginative manipulation of recorded reality. Here, he also introduced the interview format into his body of work, putting his finger on the pulse of Iranian society by collaging conflicting viewpoints.Read More »

Quote:
A deaf old man wearing a hearing aid is walking in the streets of Rasht. When the surroundings get too noisy, he turns off his sound. Unfortunately, when he returns home, he doesn’t hear his granddaughter, home from school, vainly ringing the doorbell. A chorus of children gathers to penetrate the old man’s silence.Read More »

Plot: A boy working at a tailor’s shop is being pressured by two competing friends to lend them a wedding suit on the night before it’s due to be delivered to the customer. One wants to use it for a date, the other won’t say why he needs it, and suspense builds when the suit may not get back to the shop in time.Read More »

Quote:
A boy on his way home from school kicks a ball out of street where some children are playing. He is cased and forced to take a new and much longer way home.Read More »

Abbas Kiarostami is the most acclaimed Iranian film director whose films have won prizes all around the world. In this film he gives a rare and frank interview about his work, and journeys out of Tehran to meet Babak Ahmadpoor the now grown up star of his famous trilogy, which started with WHERE IS THE FRIENDS HOUSE. On the journey Kiarostami picks up the camera himself , producing images of pure poetry.Read More »

A boy shyly watches a girl on a tram. Only when he exits the tram, and its too late, does he realize that he must meet her.Read More »

From IMDB:

The late, great, Kryzstoff Kieslowski made documentary films for over ten years before his first movie: ‘The Office’, a short shot while he was still at film school, was his first. It’s notable for its fly-on-the-wall style, then something radical and daring rather than the over-familiar device we know today. If you watch this as an extra on the ‘No End’ DVD, you can also watch an interview with a contemporary (and later collaborator) who explains how Kieslowski realized that in communist Poland, everything was political: ‘The Office’ consists of a few minutes of film in a social security office, but says a lot about the system as a whole (though as it happens, social security may have been one field where Poland was not so different to the capitalist world). This film made Kieslowski a legend among his peers, for while it is very brief, the appendage of words and images is striking and there are definite hints in the style of his later work (one thinks here of the scenes in the Post Office in ‘A Short Film About Love’, or in the cinema box office in ‘A Short Film About Killing’). Worth five minutes of any Kieslowski fan’s time.Read More »

A young man and his girlfriend are staying at a camp site near to where a group of other young men are all camped together. The busload of boys leave first but, having packed all their stuff away, the couple pass them on their motorbike – ignoring their catcalls on the way. The couple soon realize that they have dropped their tent somewhere on the road and turn back to look for it – only to find that the busload of boys has stopped and found it first. The boys make a simple proposal – the tent in exchange for the girl. –bob the moo (uk)Read More »