In Abbas Kiarostami’s THE WIND WILL CARRY US, a few men go off to a secluded Iranian village hidden behind the scale of a mountainscape. They’re hoping to record and document a ritualistic mourning process that will occur after an elderly local woman dies, but the woman doesn’t pass away, and so they’re stuck. They spend the course of the movie milling about town, hiding their identities, and killing time until the ceremony happens. You want to talk about the “elements of cinema,” well, here’s a film that uses them in singular ways: During the course of the entire film, we only see one member of said crew (“the Engineer,”) and we never even see the elderly woman in question. In fact, many of the main characters in the film are offscreen for the whole running time. Heard often, but never seen.