Shirin

“You are the screen, they are the audience.”

A hundred and fourteen Iranian actresses, and one French star, sit in the dark to watch a staging of Khosrow and Shirin, the twelfth-century Persian poem that has long been a favorite across Persia and the Middle East. Abbas Kiarostami never shows the stage. All we have of the story is the sound of it and the faces of the women listening, row after row, each one close in the frame.