First Graders – Iranian Movie Screening at UW Cinematheque

In November, we are pleased to present a restored DCP of Abbas Kiarostami’s marvelous non-fiction portrait of Tehran school boys, First Graders (1984). Often overlooked in the shadow of the more widely-shown Homework (1989), First Graders is the first of Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education. While a lot of Iranian cinematic imports over the last three or four decades have been easily classifiable as neorealist works, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind (1976), also showing in a new restoration, is, as Cinematheque programmer Mike King writes, “a haunting depiction of crumbling aristocracy much more redolent of Visconti than Kiarostami..an essential addition to the canon of Iranian art cinema.”