CINEMA AND VOLUNTARY DEATH: Representing the Desire to Die in Kiarostami and Akerman
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How does cinema represent the desire to die? At the next LYSIS meeting, we will discuss Abbas Kiarostami’s Gosto de Cereja (Ta’m e guilass) and Saute ma ville (Exploda Minha Cidade), Chantal Akerman’s first short film.
In Gosto de Cereja, Abbas Kiarostami follows Badii along the dusty roads in the hills outside Tehran. As he drives, he talks to different people and makes a difficult request. He wants them to return to the place where he plans to spend the night and see what has happened. If he is dead, they are to bury him. Each encounter opens up a conversation about death, responsibility, and what can keep someone attached to life. Yet the film never turns those conversations into a definitive explanation for Badii's decision. The camera often stays inside the car, close to the faces and attentive to the pauses, as the landscape passes outside the window. The journey continues, and the viewer is left with a question the film will not answer on their behalf. What does it mean to listen to someone's desire without reducing it to a ready-made answer?
In Saute ma ville, Chantal Akerman confines the action to a cramped kitchen. A young woman enters, shuts herself in, and begins to go about domestic tasks, cleaning, tidying, and looking after herself, in increasingly unpredictable ways. What might have been a familiar routine becomes a sequence of discordant gestures with an energy that is both comic and unsettling. Akerman makes cinema out of everyday domestic life and turns the familiar room into a place of confinement, transgression, and rupture. The film forgoes a biography that might explain the character in full. Instead, it asks us to follow her body, her gestures, and the transformation of the kitchen all the way to a radical ending.
The two films approach death differently and use different forms to bring it close to the viewer. Kiarostami constructs a journey made up of encounters and conversations, while Akerman concentrates the experience in a confined space and a succession of gestures. In both films, however, the cinematic form matters as much as the subject. The duration of the scenes, the silences, the movements, and the limits of the space keep the characters from becoming mere illustrations of an idea. The LYSIS conversation will begin with those choices to consider how cinema represents the desire to die, and what changes when we set aside the search for a total explanation and pay attention to how each film teaches us to look.
The films will be selected and the discussion led by Débora de Camargo Cavalheiro, an audiovisual director and screenwriter, a documentary-film educator, and a holder of a master's degree in Civil Engineering from the Escola Politécnica da USP.
Date: 28 October 2026 Time: 7 p.m. Format: online meeting Venue: LYSIS Virtual Classroom Join: http://webconf.ufpel.edu.br/b/ale-cf2-si3-mcw