The Experience

Director: Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami

1973 / 60min / DCP

A bridge between his early shorts and his first feature, Kiarostami’s medium-length The Experience was one of the products of the director’s employment in Kanoon, Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. A nearly wordless portrait of a mischievous orphaned teenaged photo lab assistant shot in semi-documentary-style black and white in the streets of pre-revolutionary Tehran, and a work which finds Kiarostami, at the outset of his career, already exploring questions concerning the ability of the photographic image to convey reality that will recur in mature masterworks like Close-Up and Certified Copy.