Blur-ray Release of Treasures from the Golestan Film Studio

For the first-time ever on home video, this collection presents the complete output of the iconoclastic independent Iranian film studio founded in the late 1950s by a towering figure of Iranian culture, Ebrahim Golestan. The studio’s earliest productions were documentaries that helped bring Iranian cinema to international attention, including The House Is Black, directed by the poet Forough Farrokhzad. From 1961, the studio turned to fiction. Two feature films were completed, including the pivotal Brick and Mirror – both of which are presented here. After years of circulation in compromised versions, sometimes altered by censorship, these classics, which map the origins of the Iranian New Wave, are now presented in restored and definitive versions. The nine films in this set move fluidly from prose poetry to political allegory, achieving remarkable results that have inspired generations of filmmakers from Abbas Kiarostami to Jonathan Glazer.

Abbas Kiarostami’s Early Shorts and Features: Poetic Solutions to Philosophical Problems

Abbas Kiarostami in Homework

An essay written for the Criterion release of Abbas Kiarostami’s Early Shorts and Features Blu-ray set. – EK

Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema is one of journeys. His films travel meandering routes, and his own path to international fame and recognition as one of cinema’s greatest directors was likewise mysteriously understated and subtle, almost imperceptible: a journey with marvelous detours.

Across a career marked by restlessness, which saw him making films not only in Iran but in France, Uganda, Italy, and Japan, the tireless filmmaker repeatedly reset his rules, moved from analog to digital, and transitioned from narrative film to video installations. Even as he came to be celebrated worldwide for beloved films such as Close-up (1990) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), whenever the conventional definitions of cinema became too limiting for him, he pursued creativity elsewhere. He rewrote classic Persian poems and published them in books of sparse, haikulike verses that resemble images, and he took strikingly abstract photographs of solitary trees in snow that feel like distilled poetry. His life was proof that a filmmaker could create singular images even without a movie camera.

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The best DVDs and Blu-rays of 2016

From Sight & Sound's annual poll, here's the list of some of my favourite DVD/Blu-ray releases in 2016:

• Napoleon BFI
• Shield for Murder Kino Lorber
• The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates Criterion
• Lumière! L’invenzione del cinematografo Cineteca Bologna
• Let There Be Light: John Huston’s Wartime Documentaries Olive Films