A Wedding Suit
(Lebassi baraye arossi)

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami.
With Hashem Arkan, Mohammad Fassih, Reza Hashemi.
Iran, 1976, DCP, color, 54 min.
Persian and Azerbaijani with English subtitles.

One of the lesser-known gems of Kiarostami's early career, A Wedding Suit tells the story of a teenage tailor's apprentice pressured by two boys who want to borrow a suit for an evening. A coming-of-age fable about bad friendship and the social codes of adulthood, A Wedding Suit is also an evocative poem to Tehran seen from street level, from the point of view of boys longing to become men.

PRECEDED BY

Orderly or Disorderly (Be tartib ya bedoun-e tartib)

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami.
Iran, 1981, DCP, color, 17 min.
Persian with English subtitles.

Ostensibly an educational film for children, this short seems to condense everything that is wonderful about Kiarostami’s cinema into one comical, philosophical, slightly non-fictional, perhaps lightly political—and certainly Tati-esque—offering. In his early graphic, trance-inducing style, he proceeds to make comparisons between each of the title’s antonyms under different circumstances—until those circumstances fall beyond the control of either the filmmaker or the police officer at hand.