Shirin

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

2008 / 92min / DCP

Golshifteh Farahani is one among hundreds of actresses—including the elite of Iranian cinema and Juliette Binoche—to appear in Kiarostami’s extraordinary cinematic experiment, which focuses on women spectators in close-up as they watch, offscreen, a dramatic staging of the 12th-century mythological tale of the romance of Khosrow and Shirin, a story of female self-sacrifice. A study in (specifically) female spectatorship, the making of which Kiarostami described thusly: “I worked with professional actresses, each playing a six-minute sequence. I asked them to imagine their own inner film, about love, and show the expression it would provoke.”