Would really advise forum members catching this if possible... This is a repeat of the London 2005 retro @ NFT which I caught... Really superb and fascinating stuff... What are really rare and worth seeing are his early shorts and medium length films - if only Criterion or Eclipse would box these up and release...
As regards TASTE OF CHERRY, it could due for an new anamorphic transfer by the CC... MK2, Kiarostami's co-producer release ABC AFRICA, THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES and TASTE OF CHERRY in March, following on FIVE at the end of last year, and TEN plus 10 ON TEN, and THE WIND WILL CARRY US previously, all in superbly produced editions with English subs... AE released TASTE OF CHERRY anamorphically transferred along with 10 ON TEN in 2005...
I excerpt an article I wrote on the AK London festival, mentioning some of the rarer shorts...
Finally, NFT programmes of Kiarostami's immediate post-revolutionary films (shorts and one hour pieces), feature intriguing strategies which would be subversive, if only he was interested in something as direct as a political response. In the wake of revolutionary chaos and turmoil, TOOTHACHE (1980) is a bizarre gem focussing on the subject of dental hygiene, while the probing masterwork ORDERLY AND DISORDERLY (1981), uses self-reflexivity and repetition to interrogate order and disorder and the ability to engineer both. While SOLUTION (1978) bursts unexpectedly into an unfettered celebration of freedom and nature, out of the story of a man seeking to return with his puncture repaired tyre to his abandoned car.
Longer pieces CASE NO 1 NO 2 (1979) features disruption in a school classroom and seven students suspended for a week by the teacher, because no one will own up. Adults, including parents, educational experts, tv pundits, mullahs and government ministers, wrangle over the nature of rebellion and resolution, issues of honesty, discipline, solidarity and betrayal. The prevailing thought is to recommend that the students should stick to their guns and stay silent, and even suggests a form of re-education for the teacher. The sore memory of the Shah's secret police is raw and recent. A wily Ayatollah judge from the revolutionary religious courts opines that the pupils may have held out for a greater good for the full seven days, but when they are readmitted to the classroom, they will have changed nothing, as the system and the teacher and they themselves remain just as before. Finally FELLOW CITIZEN (1983), with a foretaste of 10, intriguingly spends an hour focussing on the heated conversations of a harassed traffic warden and the motorists who are trying to gain access to a restricted traffic zone. In a theocracy that bans exposure of the human body, irate hospital bound drivers are shown waving chest x-rays under the nose of the put upon public official!
As for the MoMA installations, there will probably be SLEEPERS, TEN MINUTES OLDER, and maybe something from the recent KIAROSTAMI - ERICE collaboration, and possibly a restaging of FOREST WITHOUT LEAVES...
Hopefully there will also be a staging of his performance installation TAAZIYEH...
The exhibition of his photographs will also key into his recent short ROADS OF KIAROSTAMI, based on still images of landscape and alluding at the end to the nuclear threat to Iran and the world...