The humanism that courses through Iranian cinema is beautifully expressed in these profound and piercing meditations on mortality. Acclaimed at film festivals worldwide, Ali Asgari and Farnoosh Samadi’s THE SILENCE is a heartrending portrait of a young Kurdish refugee living in Italy who must choose what—and what not—to interpret for her mother when she receives life-changing news during a hospital visit. It is paired with one of the defining works of nineties cinema, Abbas Kiarostami’s Palme d’Or–winning masterpiece TASTE OF CHERRY, which takes a minimalist setup—a man who has decided to commit suicide drives through the outskirts of Tehran searching for someone to bury him—and imbues it with transcendent philosophical richness.