24 Frames presents twenty-four images which began life as still images, each for four and a half minutes. Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, in his final film before death, brings action to each—blowing snow and wind, crashing waves, anxious crows, frisky horses, grazing deer.

I am used to Kiarostami the coy, the sly, an iconoclast, experimenter and rebel. While 24 Frames is an experiment, it is very different from any other Iranian film I have seen, closer to video art than non-fiction/fiction film. Kiarostami made dozens of films, and I have only seen a handful, so I can only put 24 Frames within the context of creations like the genre-bending Close-Up and some similarly playful, smart and rebellious films like Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innoncence and Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film which respond to censorship, performance and to the blurred lines between facts and fiction.

As pleasant and beautiful and strange as this film is, I can't help feeling that it is more interesting and accomplished as a technical achievement than an artistic one. I found it intellectual rather than emotional. Kiarostami's exact methods for animating or imagining the pre and post life of this series of photographs (and painting) is largely unknown. I wondered what was hand-drawn or computer-generated or extrapolated from the image itself. In fact, there is much to wonder about, to ponder and to discuss; it is a film that offers as many responses and interpretations as there are viewers. It is s certainly a meditation on landscape and animals and on why humans are so peripheral to these images but central to most of his filmmaking.

If this assortment is taken as comprehensive, Kiaromstami was moved and inspired by snowy winter scenes, by isolation and austerity, by the mystery of birds and by more familiar animals (like sheep and dogs) while also suggesting that we don't know them nearly as well as we think we do.

Plays again on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 at 9:00 PM at The Cinematheque, Vancouver.