The story of how a 99-minute film about suicide with no plot split Cannes, birthed a philosophy of minimalism, and gave rise to the slow cinema movement—where nothing happens, and that’s the whole artistic statement.
🎬 May 27, 1997—at the 50th Cannes Film Festival, the jury chaired by Isabelle Adjani delivered a verdict that split the room in two: the Palme d’Or ex aequo went to two films—The Eel by Japan’s Shōhei Imamura and Taste of Cherry by Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami. 99 minutes of screen time in which a middle-aged man drives through the desert hills near Tehran in an old Range Rover, stopping at random passersby with one question: would you, for money, shovel earth over the pit where my body will lie tomorrow morning? No explanations for why the protagonist decided to kill himself. No Hollywood-style drama—just dusty switchbacks, the faces of non-professional actors in the car window, and long pauses between lines. The film was shot on a 35mm Arriflex camera with a fixed lens, using only the natural light of the Iranian hills—a technique Kiarostami had perfected over the previous decade.
🔥 The room erupted in arguments even before the prize was awarded. Some critics accused the film of being excruciatingly boring—Roger Ebert, the dean of American film criticism, gave it 1 out of 4 stars, calling it a test of audience endurance, not cinema. The other half—led by Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader—gave it the maximum 4 stars and coined the term "cinema of patience", where the viewer chooses what to watch in the frame instead of following the director’s editing logic. Years later, Rotten Tomatoes would quantify this divide: 83% positive reviews from professional critics and 80/100 on Metacritic. But the real shift didn’t happen in the theater—Cannes had legitimized minimalism as the language of global arthouse, opening the floodgates for a wave of directors for whom the absence of action became an artistic manifesto.
📹 Kiarostami didn’t arrive at minimalism through aesthetic manifestos but through the brutal economic constraints of Iranian cinema in the 1990s. In his Koker trilogy—Where Is the Friend’s House?, Life, and Nothing More…, and Through the Olive Trees—he refined his method of working with non-professional actors (villagers playing themselves), fixed cameras, and natural light because budgets didn’t allow for stars, camera crews, or lighting equipment. But the real revolution came in 2002, when he shot Ten for the price of a used car: he mounted two Sony DCR-VX2000 digital cameras on the dashboard—one facing the driver (actress Mania Akbari), the other the passenger—and hit record for ten rides without operator intervention.
🎥 The cameras ran autonomously, capturing only faces and voices. No editing within scenes—just cuts between rides. Sound was recorded on the camera’s built-in mic, no separate audio track. Lighting? Daylight through the windshield and Tehran’s streetlights at night. The result: 10 long conversation-plans between a female driver and various passengers—a teenage son, a sex worker, a friend, an elderly woman—where drama emerged not from action but from the duration of presence in the frame. The viewer couldn’t fast-forward, couldn’t skip—just sit and listen, like in real life. The cost of shooting one episode dropped to the price of a DV cassette (~$10), but the aesthetic effect was the opposite: the absence of camera movement, editing cuts, and music forced screen time to be perceived as real time.
🌊 A year later, Kiarostami pushed the method to its absolute limit. Five (full title: Five Dedicated to Ozu) runs 74 minutes and consists of five static shots filmed on the Caspian Sea coast. First shot: a piece of wood floating on the waves. Second: people strolling along the boardwalk, the camera doesn’t follow them. Third: dogs on the beach. Fourth: ducks in the water. Fifth: the moon in the clouds reflected in a nighttime pond. No people in the frame (except one scene), no dialogue, no music. Just time, light, the movement of nature. The average shot length? Nearly 15 minutes of continuous filming. Kiarostami used the same Sony DCR-VX2000, mounted on a tripod, with minimal post-production—he just selected fragments from hours of footage and spliced them together. The paradox: a technique born of poverty (digital cameras cost 10 times less than 35mm Arriflex film, no editing saved months of an editor’s work) became an aesthetic philosophy, the antithesis of Hollywood blockbusters with their 2000+ cuts per film and average shot length of 2-3 seconds.
⏱️ By the early 2000s, directors around the world began independently making films where nothing happened—and that was the point. Hungary’s Béla Tarr in The Turin Horse (2011) used shots lasting up to 30 minutes without dialogue: the camera fixed immovably on a father and daughter eating boiled potatoes, wind rustling curtains, a horse refusing to drink. Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul made Syndromes and a Century (2006) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)—the latter won the Palme d’Or—where the camera lingered on jungles, temples, hospital corridors without plot explanations. Portugal’s Pedro Costa built films from static shots of Lisbon’s slums, where immigrants from former colonies sat in dimly lit rooms and stayed silent for 10-15 minutes of screen time. Argentina’s Lisandro Alonso in Liverpool (2008) and Eureka (2023) used Patagonia’s desolate landscapes with minimalist sound—wind, creaking snow, breathing.
📰 But this movement had no name until 2003, when British critic Jonathan Romney, in a review of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, first used the term "slow cinema." That same year, French critic Michel Ciment introduced the parallel term "cinema of slowness," grouping together Tsai, Tarr, and Kiarostami. The terms stuck instantly—Cannes and Venice, since the late 1990s, had begun systematically awarding such films: after Kiarostami, Palme d’Ors went to Lars von Trier for Dancer in the Dark (2000) with its long musical sequences without editing, Michael Haneke for The White Ribbon (2009) with its static camera and pauses between lines, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Festival politics legitimized minimalism as a mark of auteur seriousness—the slower the film, the higher the chances of winning the top prize.
🎭 The paradox of slow cinema is that its roots trace back to directors who filmed long before the digital era. Italian neorealists Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, where the camera captured postwar Rome’s streets without dramatic effects. Japan’s Yasujirō Ozu, whose 1950s films consisted of static "tatami shots" (camera at the level of someone sitting on the floor) with empty corridors and courtyards between scenes. Italy’s Michelangelo Antonioni, whose characters wandered through empty urban spaces without purpose. France’s Robert Bresson with his "model" acting method—non-professionals delivering lines monotonously, without emotion. Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky with his famous 5-7-minute shots of water, wind, grass. But only the digital cameras of the 2000s, affordable to any director for a few thousand dollars, turned this aesthetic from avant-garde experiment into a global movement. Kiarostami was the bridge between analog patriarchs and the digital wave—he shot on both film and DV cassettes, proving that minimalism worked regardless of the medium.
🏆 The victory of Taste of Cherry in 1997 triggered a chain reaction in festival politics. Cannes, Venice, and Berlin—the three major A-list European festivals—began favoring films where the average shot length exceeded 30 seconds and the number of spoken lines didn’t exceed 100 for the entire film. This wasn’t a declaration but a statistic: from 1998 to 2015, out of 18 Cannes Palme d’Ors, at least 9 went to slow cinema or films close to it in aesthetic—from Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a Day (1998) to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (2014), where characters sat in rural Turkey and talked for 10-15 minutes in a single take. The Venice Film Festival awarded the Golden Lion to Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa for A Gentle Creature (2017)—a film where a woman spends 140 minutes of screen time navigating bureaucratic offices without music or editing accelerations.
🎬 The mechanics of the festival machine turned slow cinema from a marginal technique into the dominant language of auteur cinema in the 2000s-2010s. Directors from countries without developed film industries—the Philippines (Lav Diaz with his 11-hour Melancholia, 2008), Romania (Cristian Mungiu with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 2007, where the camera followed the heroines in real time), Mexico (Carlos Reygadas)—got a chance to compete with Hollywood studios on equal terms because slow cinema didn’t require big budgets. All you needed was one digital camera, natural light, and actors willing to stand or sit still. The paradox: the technique of austerity became a marker of elitism—Kiarostami’s, Tarr’s, Diaz’s films grossed $50,000-$200,000 (versus $500 million for Marvel blockbusters), but their cultural capital was higher—getting into Cannes’ main competition meant entering the canon of world art.
📌 In the 2020s, slow cinema stopped being avant-garde and became one of cinema’s recognized languages. Romanian director Radu Jude won the Berlin Golden Bear 2021 for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, where the heroine walks through Bucharest’s streets for 20 minutes without music or editing cuts—the camera simply follows her. Kazakh director Erlan Nurmukhambetov made Brother (2023)—a story of a man returning to the steppe, where shots last 5-7 minutes and dialogue takes up less than 10% of the runtime. French director Céline Sciamma in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) used static shots with natural candlelight and fireplace glow—each scene lasted as long as the characters needed to live the moment, not to fit into editing logic.
🎥 Digital technology in the 2020s—cameras like the ARRI Alexa Mini LF, Sony Venice, RED Komodo—allows shooting 8K video with 15+ stops of dynamic range in natural light, making slow cinema more technically accessible than in the era of Kiarostami’s Sony DCR-VX2000. Streaming platforms MUBI and Criterion Channel have created dedicated sections for contemplative cinema, where viewers can find both Ozu and Tarkovsky classics and contemporary festival films with minimalist aesthetics. But Kiarostami’s main legacy isn’t technique—it’s the legitimization of the idea that in cinema, nothing can happen, and that’s not a failure but a conscious artistic statement. Rosenbaum’s "cinema of patience" evolved from a critical term into a viewer’s stance—willing to give the screen not 90 minutes of entertainment but 90 minutes of their time—without guarantees of catharsis, but with the right to choose what to see in the frame.