Bitter dream (Khab-e talkh)

A crotchety cemetery director prepares his own funeral in this offbeat black comedy from Iran. Illustrating the increasing diversity of Iranian post-revolutionary cinema and the loosening bonds of state censorship, it brings a quirky, down-to-earth viewpoint to the subject of death and gets up close to the funeral director's relationships to his fellow men. The setting is Sedeh, an ancient town in central Iran with an 800-year-old cemetery outside a mosque-shrine. Old Mr. Esfandiar is the violent, mean-spirited and heartily disliked boss of an old opium-smoking gravedigger, a dizzy young boy assigned to burn the dead's clothing, and a dignified widow named Delbar who washes the bodies of dead women. Esfandiar washes the men's bodies himself. All seem to have pariah status in society at large, making theirs a tightly closed world. When the dictatorial Esfandiar finds himself visited by Azrael, the angel of death, he takes fright and tries to make hasty amends to those he's wronged. But human nature is not so easy to change…