Coming soon on Six Pillars to Persia is look at the imaginative collaboration between the ENO and Iranian Realist film-maker Abbas Kiarostami.
Since we first broadcast his talk from the V & A museum in 2005, interest in Kiarostami's work has increased tenfold. Appearing with Mike Leigh for a series of talks helped to put Kiarostami in a category the majority of people can grasp: as a realist he is, like Leigh, a man of the people.
We attended his Trees in Snow exhibition at Zelda Cheattle's gallery, a distinctly stylish et low-key affair (one of the works pictured above) and elicited a few words from the digital film-maker in Farsi via an on hand dignitary who acted as spontaneous translator. This new ENO project however has less of a fanfare attached, despite the accompanying talks and events it has spawned. It's still early days, hopefully we can expect a few episodes of Six Pillars on the opera itself and an accompanying talk.
Read more here about the production. Meanwhile if you haven't been to Shah Abbas yet at the British Museum, time is running out. We recommend taking in an event along with the exhibit the most interesting of which is a 1000km walk undertaken by Birkbeck staff in order to retrace Shah's own pedestrian pilgrimage. A man of somewhat dubious morals, the Shah was a tenacious muslim.
