In the Church of Cinema, Henri Langlois is one of the original Saints. Like St. Bazin, his name may not be well known among the Church at large. This film, perhaps, will change that. The quick version is to say Langlois was the cinema's first preservationist. The list of films we have today would be much shorter but for his dogged and faithful efforts, tracking down and storing prints, hiding cans of films from the Nazis during the Occupation, stealing — if necessary — prints destined for destruction by distributors, starting the world's first film archive. But the rest of the story is much wider, longer, and deeper: large like Langlois was large; sprawling and crammed with memories and memorabilia like his beloved Cinematheque; infinitely worthy of this three-and-one half hours documentary telling. "Henri Langlois taught us nearly everything we know," says legendary French cine-subversive, Jean-Luc Godard, who like so many directors, critics, and film historians learned to really watch and love films in those all night screenings-and-discussions at Langlois' Paris Cinematheque in the years following World War II.

This documentary probably won't spend much time in theaters. I suspect it will do its real work once it begins to be distributed on DVD, when people don't have to watch it one sitting, but can become drawn in and captivated by episodic screenings of the story. It would be the ideal way to launch a new cine-club, even a new generation of cine-clubs. These two-hundred ten minutes are filled with extended clips from films Langlois saved, screened, loved and taught others to love. Like the Musee du Cinema he created, the documentary pulls the viewer down corridors of film history, giving a taste of films like The Passion of Joan of Arc, L'Atalante, Battleship Potemkin, and so many others while at the same time inculcating Langlois' contagious love for the cinema. So much of Langlois' life itself ended up on film and video interviews that he becomes a key figure in the documentary, speaking for himself and letting us see him at work in various stages of his career. He obviously told parts of his story many times, for we see him telling it in images cut together from throughout his life, giving a sense of both his unwavering lifelong passion and the entwining of his own story with the story of cinema. The clips of movies and Langlois are combined with talking head interviews (likewise from different eras) of people talking about Langlois — a Who's Who of that great crowd of artists and academics inspired and mentored in and around the Cinematheque Langlois founded just after the war. We meet Langlois' longtime companion Mary Meerson, a character in her own right, whose strange and wonderful relationship with Henri formed a sturdy backbone to many decades of an improvised and unconventional career. We meet workers at the Cinematheque, former actors, friends, cinephiles all, who were drawn into this labor of love and spent themselves, like Henri, with little recompense but a deep sense of community and the special richness that comes of sharing a passion that took them out of the narrow cycle of consumption and personal acquisition and connected them to a mutual journey toward understanding and appreciation. To love cinema," as Langlois said, "is to love life."

Langlois became a folk hero: a self-described "bum," dishelved and rotund, who died penniless. But when the State became finally so convinced of the value of his work that they tried to take it away from him, the world's most influential film artists gratefully came to his defense, just like George Bailey's many friends. The controversy over the Cinematheque became a part of France's experience of that universally-explosive year of 1968, and news footage of Truffaut and Godard angrily speechifying to demonstraters and riot squads is a sort of French equivalent of such resonant American film footage as the riots at the Democratic National Convention that same year. Every budding cinephile has long lists of films they're busy trying to track down and see in order to be worthy of that name; add this film to that list — no, move it to the top. Langlois makes good on his promise to haunt the cinema in a way that will continue to have impact on new generations of film makers, critics, historians, festival programmers, and buffs.

One of the more astonishing things about the present Golden Era of Iranian Cinema is the spectrum of styles and visions represented in these films. And while much of the attention has been focused on the neo-realist school led by Abbas Kiarostami, or the colorful simplicity of a Majid Majidi, Iran keeps producing new directors and films that force us to expand the available categories. A most-promising new voice belongs to director Mohsen Amiryoussefi, whose film Bitter Dream again expands bounds of our expectations for films from Iran, but also, like so many other recent Iranian films, expands the bounds of the possible for cinema in general.

Bitter Dream takes place at an ancient shrine and surrounding graveyard, among the workers and the work: gravediggers, masons, the young man who burns the clothes of the dead. Above all, literally and in terms of status, the film treats the ritual washing of the dead, and the "much-feared" bossman, Mr. Esfandiar, head body-washer and Scrooge-like terror of all he rules. To say Mr. Esfandier takes pride in his work risks putting it too lightly: he bears the weight of ages in performing the virtually liturgical duty of washing corpses and wrapping them in their shrouds. Esfandier adds to his unquestioned skill at this a gift for knowing, based only on mourning style, how fast the bereaved will pay the bill. But before the viewer concludes that such a setting and subject will make for too somber a film, this one hits the ground running, with a wise and deadpan humor. Note this is not to suggest Bitter Dream is an Iranian Six-Feet Under (though it's been billed that way), or even an Islamic version of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, a black humor classic. Death has a way, it is well-known, of clarifying and focusing things, and the presence of and meditations on death in this film are set in such a way as to underscore the value of life. Bitter Dream is a life-affirming meditation on the human condition: it is both winsome and a warning.

Formally, the film is a real category-buster. Among the ongoing conversations in Iranian film is a discussion of the relationship of media to reality, as in Kiarostami's Close-Up and disciple Jafar Panahi's The Mirror. It's almost as if this new director has picked up some of the pieces left laying around from these older directors' breakdown of conventional cinema and constructed something of his own with them. He begins with the neo-realist convention of non-actors playing — apparently — themselves (character names are the same as the actor names in the credits), and having them introduce themselves directly to the audience in the opening while being interviewed by a television reporter. But this is something more subtle and original than a simple mockumentary: the interviewer and allegedly "live" television reporting dissolve into simple voice overs and images on the television Mr. Esfandiar watches, representing his thoughts. Among other things, this gives the director an excuse to employ footage from a real documentary on French burial customs which was the origin of this project. Mostly, though, the scenes of Mr. Esfandier watching his fellow workers on his television serve as an extension of earlier scenes of him doing the same thing through binoculars while standing on a sacred rock, surveying all persons and doings within his domain spread out below.

One person he keeps an especially sharp eye on is Delbar, an employee (though she complains she isn't paid what she's worth) who washes the female corpses — a job best left to women. When she isn't doing that job, Delbar doesn't stray very far from her own late husband's grave, faithfully cleaning the stone and accepting prayers from others making the rounds in the cemetery. Particularly fervant prayers are offered for Delbar's dead husband on a regular basis by a widower who seems to be fervant about more than prayer; he accepts the candy Delbar offers to those who pray, though she shrewdly makes sure his reach always exceeds his grasp.

Increasingly, though, the subject of the elderly Mr. Esfandier's observations is his own death. Woven with sequences of washing the dead is a running sequence of him washing himself or being washed in what is essentially the shrine's locker room and/or spa. He relaxes in a quiet pool chatting with Azrael, the angel of death, who Esfandier comes to believe is hovering close, or rather, closing in. The head of the shrine, Hajji Agha, to whom Esfandier gives an account, also knows what time it is, and orders Mr. E to take an apprentice, picking the likeable slacker who is supposed to burn, but also steals, the clothes of the dead. There are other preparations to make, and among these are settling accounts with those he has offended. In the midst of this personal dealing with death, Mr. Esfandier — like so many — Mr. Irkiru comes to mind — is given an opportunity to deal afresh with life. Bitter Dream reminds us that while death is everywhere, so is life, and the choice between them is not entirely out of our hands.

"Bombed-out buildings": a figurative description of slums in America, but a literal one in Sarajevo. To the usual urban problems — drugs, violence, poverty, bored adolescents with zero future — add the post-traumatic syndrome of a fratricidal war. In a plane passing over the "Golden Valley" of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the flight attendant warns passengers not to look down, they'll only see poverty and misery. Below, looking up, is young Fikrit: a Euro-homie, putting a hip hop face on his despair. "F*** everything," is the gist of the rap under the opening titles. Fikrit dreams of escaping, but he's going nowhere: sniffing glue and hanging with his dawg, Tiki. The story is set in motion when Fikrit's father dies and leaves little more than a debt that must be paid for Fikrit just to break even. After a false start with armed robbery, Fikrit and Tiki find themselves playing for even bigger stakes, hired by a corrupt cop for some dirty business. Officer Raniz is Old School, with a quote from Tito, Stalin and Mao as needed for the occasion, even if the occasion is muscling in on the local drug racket. The ongoing conversation in this film has to do with morals, the different morals people draw from the story of life. There's the usual choices: go for the gusto, look out for Number One, sex is everything, love is all you need. Despite these solid ingredients, the story loses its authority chasing around and posturing: the action seems less rooted in an authentic sense of place than in a sense of action movie expectations. The film seems like it wants to be City of God or Trainspotting, riding that dangerous razor edge between hope and despair as do the best post-Yugoslavia films (like Underground or No Man's Land). But while it touches on matters of morality, fidelity and class, what it finally seems to want is what Tikrit wants: to escape on the big shiny plane and go Hollywood, giving us a film that feels not much more street than the Belgrade Dunkin Donuts.