24 Frames

24 Frames was a challenge for Abbas Kiarostami: to create a dialogue between his work as filmmaker and photographer, to combine the two artistic languages to which he devoted his life into a single work. What happens before and after a photo is taken? To answer that question, Kiarostami selected 20 of his photographs, animated them and composed them in specific scenes using digital tools, 3D inserts, and green screens to ‘resuscitate’ images of the past, and to try to rediscover the emotions felt at the moment he snapped them. The film consists of 24 shots, about 4 minutes each, which reflect the director’s poetic and aesthetic gaze. In the first of these frames, Kiarostami illustrates his method by applying it to Peter Breughel’s painting Hunters in the Snow: the painting comes alive: smoke rises from a chimney, ravens graze in the winter landscape. In other frames, he uses photography to represent groups of tourists admiring the illuminated Eiffel Tower, horses run on snowy fields, cows plod on a seashore, lions mate in the rain, flocks of sheep graze in the snow. Melancholic and joyous, the film is a meditation on the passage of time and the fragility of existence: central themes in Kiarostami’s films. Shot over the course of three years with a team of Iranian technicians, 24 Frames is the last work by the director, who died in Paris at 76 on July 4, 2016: a masterpiece by a master of contemporary cinema.