Film Screening
Friday June 15
7pm
Sliding scale $5-$10
New Langton Arts and San Francisco Cinematheque present Terra Incognita II, an evening featuring the work of Abbas Kiarostami. We will be screening Roads of Kiarostami and A Taste of Cherry. These screenings supplement the ongoing exhibit Critical Foreground, a group show of international contemporary artists whose works foreground the representation and manipulation of landscape.
Abbas Kiarostami (b. 1940, Tehran) is a master of modern cinema and one of the few Iranian filmmakers to enjoy fame in the Western world. He has made such classic films as The Wind Will Carry Us, Through the Olive Trees, and Close Up. His films are distinguished by their simplicity; a poetic meditation slowly deepens into a sophisticated dialogue that mixes nature and culture, fact and fiction. In 1998, he became the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with A Taste of Cherry.
Program
Roads of Kiarostami (2005), 32 min
*Taste of Cherry (1997), 95 min
*Please note that we will be screening a digital version
Roads of Kiarostami makes a thoughtful probe into the connection between still photography and film. The camera follows the paths in Kiarostami's landscape photography, widening out to show the pathway's scenic context. Narrated by Kiarostami and set to a musical score, the paths are poetry: "ways of love, ways of escape...ways which destroy us, ways without conclusion like stagnant water..." (Kiarostami, 2005.) Here, the conclusion is not stagnant, but explosive; the film creates a hand-wringing anxiety about the future of our world.
Taste of Cherry follows the journey of a middle-aged man who is going to end his life. Seeking the help of someone to bury him if he succeeds, or to rescue him if the attempt fails, the characters he meets on his drive through the area surrounding Tehran all refuse to assist him, and their the diverse reasonings form the dialogue. This simple fable delivers complex meditations on life, death, and Iran.
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New Langton Arts
1246 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA 94103-3817
For further information: 415.626.5416
www.newlangtonarts.org
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