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Uganda, March 2000. At the request of the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development, Abbas Kiarostami and Seifollah Samadian arrive in Kampala. For 10 days, their DV cameras capture the faces of thousands of children, all orphans whose parents have died of AIDS. They record tears and laughter, music and silence, life and death. The documentary attests to Africa's sunny resilience in the face of so much suffering and disease.

Middle-aged Mr. Badii wishes to die in a society where suicide is considered an abomination. Driving in the hills above Tehran, he meets an assortment of different characters: Afghans; Kurds; Turks; prisoners of the desert; a soldier; a seminary student, and a museum employee. But each character has his or her own reasons to turn down the job: fear, religious scruples or the humanist?s revulsion at a life wilfully squandered. Taste of Cherry is an emotionally complex meditation on life and death.

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational reallife event -the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf- as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.