Out of the Past 2017 / Take Me Home / Iran 2016
An errant soccer ball, deserted back stairways dilapidated by time, and a few animal observers – these are the unusual protagonists of a breathtakingly composed visual study, an unforgettable Iranian filmmaker’s enchanting farewell to the silver screen. The film will be screened together with the documentary 76 Minutes and 15 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami.
Few creators have been able to work with the composition of the film image as precisely as Abbas Kiarostami, the leading personality of Iranian film. His black-and-white short, unfolding in the shady, deserted streets of a Mediterranean town, was intended as a clear interplay of static and kinetic compositions. Unfortunately, death intervened and the director’s colleagues completed the movie using Kiarostami’s carefully framed photographs of old, secluded spots, and then they added effects. The finished product presents an errant ball that takes a headlong journey down seemingly endless stairways, disturbing only the occasional animal observer. It’s as if an invisible and silent soccer match full of unexpected passes is being played in the alleyways of a town emptied by the afternoon siesta. This magical series of “animated” photographs represents the clear essence of Kiarostami’s personal mission as a filmmaker, photographer, and poet, but it is also a splendid remembrance that lodges deep in our visual memory.
Jakub Jiřiště
16 min / Black & white, DCP
Director Abbas Kiarostami
/ Dir. of Photography Abbas Kiarostami
/ Music Peter Soleymanipour
/ Editor Adel Yaraghi
/ Art Director Abbas Kiarostami
/ Producer Abbas Kiarostami
/ Production Kiarostami Foundation
/ Sales Iranian Independents
Abbas Kiarostami (1940, Tehran – 2016, Paris), the leading international figure of Iranian film bar none. At the beginning of the 1970s he helped create an important center of Iranian cinema at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran, and his short children’s movies indicated a new creative direction. He was one of the men behind the greatest successes of the Iranian New Wave that peaked in the 1970s, but he earned his international reputation after the Iranian Revolution. In the 1990s he captivated Western audiences with Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990), a reconstruction partaking of both fact and fiction. He soon became a permanent film festival fixture thanks to humanistic pictures such as Life and Nothing More (Zendegi va digar hich, 1992), Through the Olive Trees (Zire darakhatan zeyton, 1994), and Taste of Cherry (Ta’m e guilass, 1997), awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes. His filmography also includes demanding formal experiments such as the sparely narrated Ten (Dah, 2002).
Iranian Independents
P.O. Box 15875-4769, , Tehran
Iran
Phone: +98 912 319 8693
E-mail: [email protected]
Mohammad Atebbai
Sales Agent
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