"There is a sense here of an encroaching darkness humbly met, unburdened by one-note feelings such as fear or joy and simply experienced as a profound moment of enlightenment." - Keith Uhlich

It doesn't feel tremendously well put together, but what's there is incredibly powerful. A pretty good documentary; I'd like to see more of Kiarostami's work.

Less boring than Kiarostami's other films by virtue of the sheer hugeness of misery on display here. It does have its moments, but only this filmmaker could make disease, death, and suffering so banal

"A patronising survey of a national tragedy."

Honestly I expected more from Kiarostami. Attempting to describe this film the first word that pops to mind is "lazy". The guy was there with a cameraman and got a lot of footage of orphans buzzing around the camera. The interviews are uninspired and few - you probably get more minutes of self-indulgent focus on the director and his assistant themselves. For me the best thing he did here was to capture some raw African folk music.

While the apparent diffuseness may irritate some audiences, to this viewer it was more a matter of an essayistic and impressionistic approach that did not wish to "presume to know" its subject, and that managed, on a miniscule budget and with only semi-professional equipment, to produce some remarkable images and sequences that told several interrelated stories, and the story of their interrelation, however indirectly.