At the end of his life, prolific Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami – who passed away in July 2016 – was working on a series of sketches that have been gathered in this enchanting, poetic, contemplative and highly hypnotic posthumous feature. These still life and wildlife short films, elegant and full of special effects, reveal the manipulative skills and facetiae of the filmmaker, who offers the viewers a meditation on nature and artifice, reality and fiction and, therefore, a powerful and peculiar insight on cinema, its limits as well as its endless possibilities.

Made of 24 shots, fragments or microstories of 4-and-a-half-minutes long, 24 Frames surprises by its original structure, fragmented and yet ‘framed’, and an unusual non-anthropocentric perspective as the stories focus on animals, plants and landscapes rather than humans, with nature sounds and melodies replacing dialogues. Nevertheless, Kiarostami’s main achievement does not lie in the apparent originality of the structure, but rather in the way he questions the purpose of cinema and the concept of spectator, and challenges the usual boundaries between photography, painting, cinema, digital animation, and even music and theater.