Watching a movie in a movie theater is an act of collective loneliness. Shirin makes that loneliness cathartic, but by not showing the film within the film, Kiarostami avoids transforming it into entertainment. The power of our individual response to entertainment is itself the film’s subject. The film is unfinished and in a sense does not really exist without people to experience it. The audience makes the film with the filmmaker, a central tenet of Kiarostami’s filmmaking, which he often alluded to in interviews.