On the way Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) uses the landscape of Iran to think about mortality.

Taste of Cherry follows a man driving around the outskirts of Tehran looking for someone who will cover his body after he takes his own life. The film is almost entirely composed of scenes inside and around the car: the man speaking to various passengers he picks up and offers money to for the task.

Kiarostami's method — long takes in the car, often from the front seat looking at the driver, often from outside the car looking in — creates an intimacy that is the film's primary formal tool. You are in the car with this man for ninety minutes. You don't fully understand why he wants to die. He doesn't offer an explanation. The film doesn't ask you to understand; it asks you to be present.

The last passenger the man picks up is an older man who tells him, at some length, about the time he tried to take his own life and stopped because of a mulberry tree he encountered at dawn. The story is a formal inversion of the film's movement: against the protagonist's drive toward death, a narrative of turning back.

Whether the man follows through is left unresolved. The ambiguity is not evasion. It's the film's position.