Taste of Cherry

Taste of Cherry follows a middle-aged man, Mr. Badii, who drives through the outskirts of Tehran looking for someone willing to do a particular job for money. He has already dug a grave on a hillside and wants a person to return there the next morning, call his name twice and, if he does not answer, cover his body with earth. Among those he approaches are a young soldier, a seminary student and a worker at a natural history museum. Some refuse, others try to change his mind, and the film stays with his car and its passengers as the conversations unfold.

Abbas Kiarostami directed, wrote and produced the film, his fourteenth feature, following Through the Olive Trees and preceding The Wind Will Carry Us. Homayoun Ershadi plays Mr. Badii, with Abdolrahman Bagheri, Safar Ali Moradi, Mir Hossein Noori, Elham Imani and Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari in supporting roles. A co-production between Iran and France, it runs 99 minutes.

The film holds a 7.9 rating from a small number of votes on IMDb and a 7.7 rating from more than 700 votes on TMDB, while a critics' score stands at 7.3 from about 40 reviews. Audience ratings run higher than the critics' rating, though both point to a broadly favourable response.