Shirin

You are the screen, they are the audience.

A radically experimental meditation on spectatorship and emotion, where the invisible performance of a classical Persian love poem is entirely conveyed through the intimate, shifting expressions of women's faces.

A hundred and fourteen famous Iranian theater and cinema actresses and a French star: mute spectators at a theatrical representation of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian poem from the twelfth century, put on stage by Kiarostami. The development of the text -- long a favorite in Persia and the Middle East -- remains invisible to the viewer of the film, the whole story is told by the faces of the women watching the show.