Jean-Luc Godard once remarked that cinema began with D.W. Griffith and ended with Abbas Kiarostami. For me, however, cinema began with Kiarostami—and with Taste of Cherry. As a student, this film served as my passage from a world in which movies were merely entertainment to one in which cinema revealed itself as a transformative art form, distinct from all others. Its deceptively simple premise—a man searching for someone willing to assist in his suicide—functions less as a plot than as a seed from which an extraordinary cinematic experience unfolds. Kiarostami weaves the textures of everyday life in the hills surrounding Tehran into a work that hovers between documentary authenticity and fictional artifice, collapsing the boundary between the two. The result is a film of profound philosophical and emotional resonance, one that continues to redefine what cinema can be. Taste of Cherry was awarded the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Professor Cagney Gentry