Taste of Cherry (Persian: طعم گیلاس..., Ta’m-e gīlās...) is a 1997 Iranian minimalist drama film written, produced, edited and directed by Abbas Kiarostami, and starring Homayoun Ershadi as a middle-aged Tehran man who drives through a city suburb in search of someone willing to carry out the task of burying him after he commits suicide.

Mr. Badii is rarely shown in the same shot as the person he is talking to (this is partly because during the filming, director Kiarostami was sitting in the car's passenger seat).

[citation needed] Taste of Cherry was awarded the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival in the year of its release,[1] tied with Shohei Imamura's The Eel.

"[2] Rob Aldam of Backseat Mafia described the film as "an assured and studied meditation on the question of whether life is worth living".

[3] Matthew Lucas of From the Front Row wrote:[4] "The ending is ambiguous in the most lovely Kiarostami tradition, but its segue into behind the scenes footage is as exhilarating as it is disorienting.

Of the minority of negative reviews, Roger Ebert's in The Chicago Sun-Times was the most scathing, giving the film 1 out of 4 stars.

In his own review of Kiarostami's film, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader awarded it a full four stars.

It does invite us into the laboratory from which the film sprang and places us on an equal footing with the filmmaker, yet it does this in a spirit of collective euphoria, suddenly liberating us from the oppressive solitude and darkness of Badii alone in his grave... Kiarostami is representing life in all its rich complexity, reconfiguring elements from the preceding 80-odd minutes in video to clarify what’s real and what’s concocted... Far from affirming that Taste of Cherry is "only" a movie, this wonderful ending is saying, among other things, that it’s also a movie.

About the ending and its detractors, Calum Marsh wrote:[11] "It’s baffling that anybody anywhere could watch Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, love it enthusiastically, and then suggest that its life-affirming pomo coda be excised, as throngs of broadsheet admirers did after the film’s premiere at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival (even more perplexingly, Kiarostami actually heeded their advice, lopping off the ending for its theatrical run in Italy).

Those precious final moments—a meta-textual break from the action, shot on video, in which the cast and crew are shown preparing a scene from the film to the sounds of “St.

James Infirmary”—are a grand and graceful move beyond the text of both film and life, a liberation from a hero’s grave and a narrative’s closure.

That’s where the long journey into night and death bring us: We awaken in daylight, outside the world of the film, rejoicing in the action of cinema.