So I’m like, hey, it’s cool that I finished up the top 100 on the Sight & Sound 2022 list… but also, with more critics, they did publish it out to 250 this time around. (I think they did publish the extended 2012 list at one point, but the main list clearly only ever had 100 entries.) So… what if I just kept going?

Well, the next one I haven’t seen, tied at #101, is… oh dear, an Iranian black and white documentary about a leper colony directed by a poet. My motivation nearly disappeared right here, but then I saw that it was only twenty minutes long, and hey, I can do twenty minutes of anything.

So, I have to say, I’m kinda glad it was only twenty minutes, because this was hard to watch. It’s absolutely unflinching and leprosy is not a pretty disease. It’s well-made and there is kind of a thematic throughline of setting religious devotion and gratitude against the reality that the people being portrayed have been dealt a shitty hand by a cruel god. At one point a teacher asks a child why we should be grateful for our mother and father, and the kid answers, “I don’t know, I don’t have either.”

The director (Forough Farokhzad, a notable poet who died young; this is her only film) is clearly making here a compassionate film, which is celebrating the vitality and humanity of her subjects without denying the shittiness of the disease they suffer from. It’s not a fun watch, it’s not something where I can say that you’ll be happy you’ve seen it. But at the same time, I do think it’s worth taking twenty minutes to watch.