For an International Art Cinema class during my senior fall, I was tasked to design a film based on one of the directors we’d talked about in class. The director I chose to embody was the legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, whose films touched on contemporary Iran through metanarratives that are framed as taking place in the “real” world, with many of his films being narratives about the making of some of his own movies. I felt this was both an opportunity to use my intercultural GEM skills to write from the perspective of a filmmaker from a completely different positionality than my own, as well as touch on issues in modern-day Iran and the Middle East by centering the plot around the making of active Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. The project, featuring a write-up of my ideas, a scene-by-scene plot description, and follows below:
