Shirin

BFI

Iran Heritage Foundation

What Shirin shows us - and indeed all it shows us - is an audience of more than 100 women who are deeply absorbed in watching a film we never see. We observe instead how the drama plays out on the faces of the audience, seen in close-up, mostly one at a time, illuminated by the flickering light of the screen. It is a mesmerising series of portraits of women young and old, many of them strikingly beautiful, their expressions variously wistful, quizzical, amused, enraptured and distraught. Also helping us to reconstruct the tale for ourselves are the unseen film's impassioned narration, dramatic dialogue, romantic, doom-laden score, and richly evocative sound effects.

Based on a 12th-century Persian poem, the film-within-the-film is a story of star-crossed love as well known in modern-day Iran as Romeo and Juliet is in the West. Shirin, a beautiful Armenian princess, falls madly in love with a portrait of Khosrow, a young Persian prince, and sets out on horseback to find him, unaware that he has already gone in search of her. ...

Shirin makes us acutely aware that the film being watched by the women is imagined differently by each one as she brings her own personality and experience into play with what is happening on screen. To an even greater extent, though, the film that we are watching demands that we use our own imaginations, whether piecing together the unseen melodrama or speculating on the off-screen lives of its female audience. While never failing to engage our emotions, Kiarostami's Shirin also heightens our appreciation of the beguiling, subversive and consoling power of cinematic story-telling.

Iran 2008
90 Minutes
Certificate PG

Visit the BFI website for a list of cinemas showing Shirin

BFI
£8.60 / £6.25 concs. / Tuesdays £5
BFI Members: £7.60 / £5.25 concs.

Barbican Centre
For prices contact box office +44 (0)20 7638 8891