Abbas Kiarostami reinforces his claim to be world cinema's most ambitious director with The Wind Will Carry Us, a resolutely non-drama, that is more interested in the sights and rhythms of the everyday than anything so mundane as narrative, writes David Parkinson.

Arriving in the isolated Kurdish hillside village of Siah Dareh, with a crew we never see, Behzad Dourani is on a mission to record for posterity a rare and ancient death ceremony. However, as they hang around the village waiting for a sick old lady to pass away, Behzad comes under increasing pressure from faraway forces with whom he can only communicate by mobile phone from the top of a distant peak.

Meanwhile, his crew are growing bored and spending more time with the locals, who chose to converse with Behzad only through Farzad, a schoolboy, who is invariably in a hurry to be elsewhere. Such is Bahzad's preoccupation that he fails to notice the intrigue and splendour of life around him the eccentric romance between a well-digger and a girl who milks her cows in the dark; the feud between a teashop owner and her indolent husband; the good-natured indifference of a mother of nine at the birth of her tenth child; and the forebearance of a crippled teacher who finds solace in verse.

Kiarostami is on record as favouring a 'half-created cinema, unfinished cinema that attains completion only through the creative spirit of the audience'. That's certainly the challenge presented by this utterly brilliant film. For, as we spectate and speculate about the various characters, the director passes subtle social observations and uses the poetry of the legendary Furough Farrokhzad to suggest living for the moment is preferable to hoping for the uncertain rewards of paradise.

Shot through with Renoiresque humanism, this typically droll Kiarostami assault on intellectual torpor is also, more importantly, a tribute to the dignity, durability and inestimable value of the very people modern Iran has chosen to marginalise.

It's a beautiful, demanding and inspiring picture and it makes the majority of the commercial dross churned out by Hollywood seem even more trivial and redundant than they already are.