“Done with the patience of a Sufi master with an eternity as his frame of reference, his long shots/long takes dwell on a vision of reality long enough to strip it of all its pretenses of meaning. Once the absolutism of reality (as the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg would call it) begins to ooze out of our received conceptions of what is real Kiarostami gently leads what remains into a whole new world of significance. His camera made the foreign familiar by making the familiar foreign.” (Hamid Dabashi)