The co-winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival (along with Shohei Imamura’s The Eel), Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry is an emotionally complex meditation on life and death. Middle-aged Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran looking for someone who will accept money to bury him if he succeeds in committing suicide. He gives lifts to three candidates – a young Kurdish soldier, an Afghan seminarian, and an aged Turkish taxidermist – to whom he proposes this grim task. A road movie of self-discovery, Taste of Cherry is an unexpected affirmation of the very things that make life worth living.

The screening will be introduced by Jean-Michel Frodon.

Notes by David O’Mahony