Shirin

In this work, Kiarostami's camera focuses on the intense gazes of 114 women sitting in a cinema—113 Iranian actresses and one European, Juliette Binoche—as they watch a film adaptation of the 12th-century Persian epic poem The Story of Khosrow and Shirin. The film they are watching can be heard off-screen, but is never seen. Based on this deliberate absence, Kiarostami ventures into a unique formal experiment: he constructs a new cinema using only faces and silences, transforming the viewers of one film into the protagonists of another.