What does it mean that American Cinematheque’s Bleak Week, an L.A. film festival formed in 2022 celebrating “unimaginable tragedies, existential fear, nihilism and shocking acts of brutality,” is essentially a lineup of some of the best films ever made? Maybe despair is the best emotion to explore in the cinematic medium – as shown by Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. Ostensibly a tale of a middle-aged Tehrani man on a mission to find someone to bury him after he kills himself, the slate of interactions he has on this journey is a quiet meditation on the meaning of life and humans’ agency to take it or leave it. Winner of the 1997 Palme d’Or, this classic of slow cinema is brought to you by Hyperreal partnering with the Paramount to bring the festival to Austin through the first week of June. – Lina Fisher
