Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1976 • Iran
Ostensibly a film for children, this picture-book essay about the range of hues that brighten our world has the air of a delightfully playful formalistic exercise. As a narrator runs though the colors one by one, Abbas Kiarostami shows us where each appears in nature and human life (which occasions some great views of prerevolutionary consumer culture in Iran). Of course, a little boy is featured—in one memorable sequence, he fantasizes about being a race-car driver.
Up Next in Abbas Kiarostami’s Childhood Films
-
Tribute to Teachers
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1977 • Iran
An assignment from Iran’s Ministry of Education, this documentary from the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty includes interviews with officials who predictably praise teaching as a sacred, noble, and honorable profession. The teachers who are also inter...
-
First Case, Second Case
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1979 • Iran
Starring Mehdi Azadbakht, Mohammadreza Barati, Hedayat Matin DaftariMade in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow, this extraordinary film serves as a Rorschach blot for people in a revolutionary mindset. Abbas Kiarostami stages two v...
-
Toothache
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1980 • Iran
Though much of this film by Abbas Kiarostami is a straightforward lecture about dental hygiene delivered by a dentist facing the camera, it still manages to be persuasively Kiarostami-esque in its description of young Mohammad-Reza’s life at home and sc...
