The Cinematheque

New Restoration

Kiarostami planted another flag on cinema’s summit with his masterful follow-up to the Cannes-winning Taste of Cherry. Mysterious, metaphysical, and yet marvellously droll, Wind has a small group of city slickers arriving in a sleepy village in Iranian Kurdistan. The reason for their visit is not immediately clear. The villagers think they may be looking for buried treasure. Or involved in telecommunications. The leader of the strangers, the tight-lipped, camera-toting ​“Engineer” (Behzad Dorani, the sole pro actor in the cast), seems particularly interested in local funeral customs. Kiarostami portrays his rural subjects with characteristic warmth and affection; recurrent references to death and the afterlife, and the unusual use of off-screen presences, hint at deeper layers of meaning. This understated, enigmatic, seductively beautiful work, with a title derived from a Forough Farrokhzad poem, won two major prizes at Venice.