With Shirin, the highly regarded Abbas Kiarostami continues to explore the potential of cinema , reimagining an iconic story, based on a 12th century Persian poem,  through showing us an audience of women deeply absorbed in watching a film we never see ; an activity women have traditionally been excluded from in Iran.

What Shirin shows us - and indeed all it shows us - is an audience of more than 100 women who are deeply absorbed in watching a film we never see. We observe instead how the drama plays out on the faces of the audience, seen in close up, mostly one at a time - a mesmerising series of portraits of women, young and old, their expressions variously wistful, quizzical, amused, enraptured and distraught.

Based on the powerful 12th Century Persian poem by Nazami, the film-within-the-film is a story of star-crossed lovers and female self-sacrifice that is as well known in modern-day Iran as Romeo and Juliet is in the West.