Shirin, Abbas Kiarostami

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. At Batalha, we present the Iranian master's film in an installed version.

Free entry