The Bread and Alley

“The mother of all my films,” according to Abbas Kiarostami, starts out as a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran's alleys carrying a loaf of bread. Variations on both the boy and the old man he sees and begins to follow factor into future Kiarostami films, as do the use of “dead time,” the hero’s journey and the poetic articulation of space. The final scene, involving a dog and a door, ends things on a note of wry ambiguity.