Screen/Society--"Taste of Cherry" (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
Film Screening:
"Taste of Cherry"
(Abbas Kiarostami, 1997, 99 min, Iran, Persian with English subtitles, DCP)
This austere, emotionally complex drama by the great Abbas Kiarostami follows the enigmatic Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) as he drives around the hilly outskirts of Tehran looking for someone who will agree to bury him after he commits suicide, a taboo under Islam. Extended conversations with three passengers (a soldier, a seminarian, and a taxidermist) elicit different views on mortality and individual choice. Operating at once as a closely observed, realistic story and a fable populated by archetypal figures, TASTE OF CHERRY challenges the viewer to consider what often goes unexamined in everyday life.
-- Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival
"The loose stories, contemplative style, and relative absence of plot in Kiarostami's films free us from feeling manipulated, even as we are patiently led to endings that are quite often emotionally shattering." - A.S. Hamrah
"Kiarostami, like no other filmmaker, has a vision of human scale that is simultaneously epic and precisely minuscule." - New York Times
"A Masterpiece." - Film Comment
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A. S. Hamrah is the author of "The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018" and "Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019-2025". He is the film critic for n+1 and writes for a number of other publications, including Harper's, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Fast Company, The Baffler, and the Criterion Collection. He has worked as a movie theater projectionist, a semiotic brand analyst in the television industry, a political pollster, a football cinematographer, and for the film director Raúl Ruiz. He produced the feature-length documentary "Bunker", directed by Jenny Perlin, which was the opening night film at the Museum of Modern Art's Doc Fortnight in 2022. He lives in New York.
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View Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JM7lMbf5e8
Parking Info: https://artscenter.duke.edu/parking
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Related Event:
"An evening with film critic A.S. Hamrah"
Monday, March 2, 2026, 7:00pm
Letters Bookshop (116 W Main St, Durham NC)
A reading, book signing, and conversation with A.S. Hamrah, film critic for The Baffler, n+1, Harper's, and more. Hamrah's two new collections of film writing are must-reads for anyone trying to make sense of filmgoing in this time of corporate culturemaking.
