Film

76 Minutes and 15 seconds with Abbas Kiarostami

Name: 76 Minutes and 15 seconds with Abbas Kiarostami
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2016
Cast: Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Ali Reza Raiesian, Tahereh Ladanian, Juliette Binoche

Light-hearted
Slow-burning

A intimate portrait of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami in his final years, captured by filmmaker friend Ali Samadian. Rather than formal interviews, we find Kiarostami amid poetry, landscapes, and easy conversation with fellow artists like Jafar Panahi and Juliette Binoche. It's a meditation on creativity, friendship, and mortality—a glimpse of the man behind the cinema.

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But Three hours of modest, meandering dailiness. If you hate Linklater's dialogue-heavy style, this will feel precious and indulgent.

In the Mirror of the City1975

Andrei Tarkovsky's dreamlike meditation on memory, cinema, and mortality. As profound as Kiarostami, from a different tradition. A master recognizing another.

But Extraordinarily demanding and cryptic. Watching it feels like decoding a poem you're not sure exists. Not relaxing cinema.

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Both filmmakers use long takes, patience, and acceptance of strangeness to address absence and the traces we leave behind.

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