Abbas Kiarostami Retrospective. Before the Revolution

Kiarostami’s earliest films—the black-and-white short The Bread and Alley and the just under one-hour-long black-and-white drama The Experience—already crystallize his vision of cinema as a subtle play between reality and mimesis, document and imagination, transparency and impenetrability. Garage Screen presents the Russian premiere of the restored versions of these films.

Детство, футбол и одиночное постижение мира за пределами дома — лейтмотивы короткого метра «После уроков» и полного метра «Путешественник», ранних фильмов Киаростами, которые словно продолжают друг друга. Обе картины — взрослое кино о детях, в котором в опыте ребенка отражается необъятная протяженность мира — физическая и экзистенциальная, и всегда превосходящая человеческий опыт. В Garage Screen пройдет российская премьера отреставрированных версий фильмов.

The short Solution and the feature A Wedding Suit belong to the period in Abbas Kiarostami's work that can be described as neorealist and have clear genre overtones. Solution is a witty adventure/absurdist sketch about a man that can find an extravagant solution to any difficult situation. A Wedding Suit is a drama about three teenage friends that secretly share a wedding suit that does not belong to them: a seductive symbol of adulthood and social status. Garage Screen will show the Russian premiere of the restored films.

First Case, Second Case is Kiarostami’s moral parabola, filmed with difficulty at the dawn of the Iranian Revolution. A persistent knock on something disrupts the lesson. Trying to detect the culprit, the teacher expels seven boys from the back of the classroom, where the noise originated. The boys have a choice—to either betray the person responsible or show solidarity and share the punishment. These two choices are commented on by the pupils’ parents and representatives of the Iranian authorities, their often opposing views revealing the dialectics of relations between a person and a collective, order and resistance, opposition and power, which becomes especially acute in an era of political change. The screening is preceded by Kiarostami’s short Tribute to the Teachers—a documentary portrait of experienced teachers and their grown-up students, some of whom have also become pedagogues. Garage Screen presents the Russian premiere of the restored films.