The Eclipse Viewer – Episode 65 – Abbas Kiarostami: Early Shorts and Features [Part 2]
DEC 15, 2025-1 MIN
The Eclipse Viewer – Episode 65 – Abbas Kiarostami: Early Shorts and Features [Part 2]
DEC 15, 2025-1 MIN
Description
This podcast focuses on the Eclipse Series, box set editions of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed films recently revived by the Criterion Collection. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each set and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor discuss two films (Experience and A Wedding Suit) from Eclipse Series 47: Abbas Kiarostami – Early Shorts and Features. Thirteen other films included in this set will be covered in future episodes.
About the films:
Long before he became one of the most renowned artists in world cinema, the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami began his cinematic career at Tehran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (a.k.a. Kanoon), where he honed his distinctive style and themes. During his first decades as a filmmaker, Kiarostami moved freely among documentary, narrative, and even animation, and between joyous short films made for children and subtle works exploring the struggles of adolescents. Often using the classroom as a laboratory, he probed social and political tensions in Iranian society during the turbulent years before and after the 1979 revolution. Spanning his very first short, Bread and Alley (which the director called the “mother of all my films”); other underseen early revelations, like Experience and The Traveler; and nonfiction masterpieces such as Homework, the graceful, warm, and playful works collected here find moments of transcendent poetry within everyday life, and use deceptively simple premises to express universal truths about the human condition.
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Episode Links
Link to Part 1: Beginnings and Journeys (featuring Colors, Bread and Alley, Breaktime, and The Traveler)
Abbas Kiarostami
The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Channel
Abbas Kiarostami’s Childhood Films (Criterion Channel documentary short, suggested viewing mentioned on inside cover of the set)
Wikipedia
Letterboxd
The American Scholar
British Journal of Photography
Harper’s
The Point
Senses of Cinema
ShotDeck
Sight & Sound
Criterion – In Memoriam
Box Set Reviews
Blu-ray.com
Home Theater Forum
Let’s Talk Criterion (video)
Under the Radar
Wall Street Journal
Experience (1973)
The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Channel
Wikipedia
Letterboxd
In Review Online
Senses of Cinema
A Wedding Suit (1976)
The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Channel
Wikipedia
Letterboxd
In Review Online
Senses of Cinema
Contact us
David Blakeslee ( TikTok / YouTube / Facebook / CriterionCast / Blog )
Trevor Berrett ( Instagram / Website / The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast )