Taste of Cherry

The premise of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s film, winner of Cannes’ Palme d’Or, is simple. The apparently well-to-do Mr. Badii drives his Range Rover around the hilly outskirts of Tehran, looking for someone to bury him when he commits suicide (he has already dug his grave next to a cherry tree.) A soldier, a laborer, a young Islamic scholar all refuse him; then a Turkish taxidermist agrees, but then confesses the reasons he has found to live, after attempting to take his own life.

Kiraostami’s camera constantly pulls back to long shots of soldiers marching, and laborers at work. An eloquent parable of the fragile preciousness of life.

Part of our series on Revolutionary Visions in Iranian Cinema. Cosponsored by the Iranian Graduate Student Association at Cornell.

more info at this website: www.janusfilms.com/films/1037

In Farsi with English subtitles