About Elly

“Gripping as sheer storytelling, the plot…touches on masculine honor, on the way a thoughtless laugh can wound someone’s feelings, on the extent to which we try to take charge of others’ fates. I can’t recall another film that so deeply examines the risks of telling lies to spare someone[’s] grief.” —David Bordwell

From the director of The Separation, Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, comes About Elly, the story of a group of friends from Iran who are vacationing by the Caspian Sea. In a twist reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Elly, who is invited as a potential match for one of the divorced men on the trip, mysteriously disappears, and the friends begin pointing fingers as to who might be at fault. Unreleased in the US after the original distributor went bankrupt, About Elly captured the Silver Bear at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival and was voted the 4th greatest Iranian film of all time in a poll of Iranian critics. (119 mins., DCP)