The Wind Will Carry Us

More accessible than his Cannes Film Festival award-winning The Taste of Cherry, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's mesmerizing and leisurely paced The Wind Will Carry Us still requires thoughtful attention and patience from viewers. Arriving in a hillside village, a Tehran engineer and his crew pass themselves off as archaeologists looking for treasure, when in fact they are there to observe an ancient mourning ceremony they anticipate will be performed on a terminally ill elderly woman. The engineer enlists a local lad to serve as his guide and spy to update him on the woman's condition, while he himself mingles with the villagers, makes frantic phone calls to Tehran (he must race to higher ground to get a signal) and receives life-affirming advice from the resident doctor ("prefer the present"). The widescreen presentation does justice to Kiarostami's reflective compositions and panoramic landscapes, which--as New York Times critic A.O. Scott puts it--makes for a film that the viewer doesn't "so much watch…as dwell in." Highly recommended. (K. Lee Benson)[DVD/Blu-ray Review—Aug. 12, 2014—Cohen, 118 min., in Farsi w/English subtitles, not rated, DVD $29.98, Blu-ray: $39.98—Making its latest appearance on DVD and its Blu-ray debut, 1999's The Wind Will Carry Us sports a great transfer. Extras include audio commentary by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and scholar Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, a conversation with director Abbas Kiarostami and Richard Peña, and an essay by critic Peter Tonguette. Bottom line: a contemporary foreign classic makes a welcome debut on Blu-ray.]