This article examines how Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) creates sacred experience through systematic absence within contemporary slow cinema aesthetics. While previous scholarship has focused on religious content in spiritual cinema, this analysis demonstrates how formal techniques—particularly strategic concealment and extended duration—generate contemplative states without...
Baraka: A World Beyond Words (1992) is a guided meditation that aims to induce the transcendent experience in the viewer. Through the eyes of a Zen Buddhist monk, the viewer is invited to meditate on the various phenomena that testify to the existence of the transcendent (the first eight chapters), to experience the everyday world where the transcendent is painfully absent (the next eleven...