This film is part of our winter series, running at De Uitkijk throughout December and January. This year, our winter series focuses on loneliness, but don’t worry, you can still enjoy warmth and good company at De Uitkijk…!
An elderly railway signalman no longer understands the meaning of ‘retirement’ when he is handed his pension letter. The letter abruptly disrupts his quiet existence. The man tries to grasp what this change means for him and how he must find his place in a world that slowly moves on without him. As he navigates between uncertainty and resignation, it becomes clear how fragile his daily balance is.
Still Life (1974) won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale and is a masterfully timed exercise in silence and solitude. Sales uses the inexpressiveness of his protagonist as an aesthetic strategy and finds poetry in seemingly dead moments. Made in just eleven days and filmed with the painterly vision of cinematographer Houshang Baharlou, Still Life is regarded as one of the defining Iranian films of the 1970s.