Close Up – Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future by Hamid Dabashi

Hamid Dabashi presents a comprehensive, passionate, and insightful personal account on the evolution of Iranian art cinema in Close Up – Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future. By presenting the works of key films and filmmakers within the contextual framework of Iranian history – in particular, from the state-sponsored, forced modernization programs initiated by the […]

Contemporary Film Directors: Abbas Kiarostami by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum

The unorthodox presentation of individual criticism by two admirers of Kiarostami’s cinema from different continents in the book Contemporary Film Directors: Abbas Kiarostami is a fascinating approach: the first, a more universal, Western ‘outsider’ perspective from the venerable American film critic Rosenbaum, then subsequently, a more culturally rooted, ‘insider’ perspective from contemporary Iranian filmmaker Mehrnaz […]

The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999

A group of men from the city of Tehran traverse the rural Iranian countryside on a jeep, guided by a set of descriptive, yet unavoidably imprecise directions, seemingly lost. The driver (Behzad Dourani), respectfully called “Engineer” by the villagers, eventually encounters his appointed contact along the side of the road: a gentle, courteous boy named […]