In the bare, dust-coloured hills above Tehran, a middle-aged man steers a Range Rover along switchbacks of loose earth, slowing beside strangers to put a question he never quite finishes. Abbas Kiarostami built his 1997 drama out of that one unhurried search.
What is Tame Gilas about?
Mr. Badii has made up his mind about something, and what he needs now is not advice but a pair of hands: someone willing to drive out to a spot on the hillside early the next morning and complete an arrangement he has quietly prepared for himself. He circles the quarries at the city's edge, offering unnamed work and unnamed wages, sizing up whoever climbs into the passenger seat. A young conscript panics and bolts. An Afghan seminarian answers gently, immovably, out of doctrine. An older Azerbaijani taxidermist takes the job, then spends the drive talking about mulberries and the taste of fruit at dawn.
The K-Time take
Kiarostami withholds nearly everything a conventional drama is supposed to hand over — no backstory, no domestic scene, no account of what brought Badii to this hillside. The camera mostly rides in the passenger seat, or watches from far off as the car crawls across an excavated slope. What fills the vacuum is talk, and the talk is unusually good. Homayoun Ershadi, an architect with no screen experience before Kiarostami spotted him in traffic, holds the picture together with a face that declines to explain itself. The closing minutes, shot on grainy video, split audiences at Cannes and still do. Our honest note: the first half hour can feel becalmed if you are waiting for incident. Stay in the car.
About the cast
Ershadi, cast almost by accident and later a familiar face in international productions, plays Badii with a stillness that reads differently on each re-watch. Abdolhosein Bagheri and Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari appear among the largely non-professional performers Kiarostami preferred, and the long passenger-seat exchanges belong as much to them as to the man at the wheel.
Context & significance
The film took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997, sharing the prize that year, and it carried Iranian cinema further into international circulation than any work before it. Kiarostami recorded the long car dialogues unusually, often filming one performer at a time and reading the other half of the exchange himself from behind the camera. Ninety-five minutes long, it sits at the centre of the minimalist style he spent two decades refining.
Watching Tame Gilas on K-Time
Tame Gilas streams on K-Time with a free account login; the page itself is open to read without signing in. K-Time is built for Persian-speaking viewers abroad, with a Farsi interface and a catalogue organised around Iranian cinema.