Tenth and final session of the film programme Manoel de Oliveira Espectador, which explores Oliveira's experience as a filmgoer, revisiting films and filmmakers which were essential in his journey as a cinephile.

BAD MA RA KHAHAD BORD | THE WIND WILL CARRY US

Abbas Kiarostami | IRN | 1999 | 118’

One of Jean-Luc Godard's famous quotes states that ""cinema starts with D.W. Griffith and ends with Kiarostami"". The Wind Will Carry Us is one of the most evocative films from the Iranian auteur, bringing us an ambiguous meditation on the values of life and death, and of cinema and time as well. Bezhad, a civil engineer passing himself as a journalist, reaches a remote Kurdish village to document the mourning rituals which preceed the incoming death of an elderly woman. But as the woman takes her time in dying, Bezhad remains in the village, forging an unlikely connection with the village's rhythms and lifestyle. Kiarostami was, to Manoel de Oliveira, one of the most important orientation in contemporary cinema. An heir both to neorealism and the Persian lyrical tradition (the film's title is taken from a poem by Forough Farrokhzad, a feminist poet and filmmaker, who directed the documentary The House is Black), Kiarostami is a filmmaker that maintains a ""wise candour in his films, now completely lost in most national cinemas around the world, which I consider to be one of the most valid values of Humanity"" (Manoel de Oliveira, Sayings and Writings, Fundação de Serralves, p. 257).