Abbas Kiarostami

An Iranian man is driving around in his car, looking for someone who can help him out. He is struggling with life and ponders about killing himself, but he needs someone to bury him if he decides to go through with it. Nobody seems very keen on helping, until he runs into a taxidermist who can use the money to save his own kid.

It's a very interesting premise and the settings lends the film a very pensive, calming atmosphere. Kiarostami doesn't rush things, but the discussions the lead has with the passersby are quite bland, and the ending wasn't quite as thought-provoking as it was obviously intended to be. Fewer dialogues, more tracking shots is what would've made this a better film, but alas.

Keshavarz is a director working on Zendegi Edame Darad (Kiarostami's previous film). He's mixing inexperienced actors with a few seasoned artists, but once he starts shooting things don't go quite as planned. There's a relationship blossoming between the leads of his film, and it's impacting the production.

The performances are okay, but not too great. The cinematography is plain, the settings are rather grim (apart from the finale), and the conversations are meandering. There's a certain rhythm that keeps the films going, but it never truly engaged or gripped me. Kiarostami's films are not really for me.

After an earthquake hits Guilan, the region is suffering. A director who shot a film there a couple of years ago goes on a little field trip with his son, to visit the actors that came from the area. When they meet with the people there they learn that life doesn't just revolve around material possessions.

The actors do a decent job and the film does feel like watching a real documentary, but that's not really positive in my book. The cinematography is bland, the score is lacking and the topic didn't interest me in the slightest. Kiarostami just isn't for me it seems, but I can respect what he accomplished here.

The saddest part was that many of the short didn't even deal with the future, but openly referred to or praised the medium's past. There's also a lot of doom and gloom, with some very basic visions of people not caring enough about arthouse cinema, or playing movies on their phones. Your typical old-man-yelling-at-cloud stuff.

There is only a small selection of directors who seem to have understood the brief, and they struggle to make the most of their limited runtime. What remains is a complete mess, with most shorts looking like they were made on people's afternoon off, and hardly anything that stands out. A disappointment.

The film offers 10 scenes in a car. A mother is driving around with various people, Kiarostami documents their conversations. There are only two camera angles. One is looking at the driver, the other at the passenger. The underlying narrative outlines the position of women in a society dominated by men.

One thing that generally bugs me about Middle-Eastern films is the noisiness of the characters. The first scene has two people shouting for 10 minutes, where half the conversation is one person asking the other not to shout. The rest of the fragments didn't really do it for me either. The concept is interesting, the execution terrible.

Ahmed is 8. When he comes home from school, he noticed that he took a classmate's notebook with him. Ahmed feels bad about the situation, but the boy lives in a neighboring village, too far to go by himself. That doesn't stop him from undertaking a journey to get the notebook to his rightful owner.

I didn't care much for the boy's performance, the people he meets on the road aren't very interesting either and Kiarostami's styling has never been something I've cared for. The film is noisy, characters are pretty irritating and the Ahmed's journey is too uneventful. Not my kind of film.