Shirin (2008) Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Screenplay by Mohammad Rahmanian, based on the poem, Khosrow e Shirin by Farrideh Golbou. Produced by Abbas Kiarostami and Hamideh Razavi. Starring: Niki Karimi, Golshifteh Farahani, Juliette Binoche. Running time: 92 minutes.

Kiarostami premiered this film at the 65th Venice International Film Festival in 2008, where it received an enthusiastic response. Shirin is composed of simple close-ups of more than 100 women’s faces as they watch a play about an 800-year-old Persian love story, Khosrow and Shirin. The play is offscreen and revealed in telescoping flashbacks, while the women’s expressions reveal their emotional involvement with this romance about female self-sacrifice and the love triangle between an Iranian king, an Armenian queen and a sculptor. The women’s faces reconstruct the unseen narrative, reflected in their floods of tears, biting of lips, fiddling with headscarves, or expressions of rapt attention. The women are well-known Iranian personalities whom Kiarostami has not worked with before, as he generally uses non-professional actors. For Shirin, he filmed the actresses individually in his studio, asking each one to gaze at a blank space above the camera and imagine an incident or a film. Later, dialogue and sound effects were created and the audio-visual relationship layered together and edited.

Over the years, Kiarostami’s film-making has become increasingly minimalist, abstract and experimental, his approach more like an installation artist and photographer than a feature film-maker. In Shirin, he succeeds in creating a fascinating tension between film narrative and film imagery. The narrative illusion shows his commitment to fiction, not in the sense of fooling the audience, but in exploring the many methods of storytelling that film offers.