In conventional films gesture and detail are used to bolster the central drama and, if the script is tightly knitted, are always relevant. They are often there in fact to hint at, or guide you towards, the main event. It is a brave, confident, even maverick director who reverses the process so that small moments of conversation and behaviour are right up front, with the story happening off-screen. And this is the technique of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who has been enthused over by critics for some time now and who went on to win the Palme D'Or at Cannes with "The Wind Will Carry Us".

It concerns an engineer (so he claims) who travels to Kurdistan from Tehran to work on a project which is never once specified. He is a silent, mysterious character who befriends a young schoolboy sitting exams and wanders about the countryside in his jeep. The only regular hints of what might be going on are given via his mobile phone on which he has blunt, monosyllabic conversations, at least when he has a signal. Both conversations and acting are always very undramatic, very real.

In lesser hands than Kiarostami's, "The Wind Will Carry Us" would be thin and shambolic, yet the director's imaginative camera work and fluent editing manage to sustain his defiantly anti-narrative offering, in which he also captures the rich, yellow beauty of the cornfields and the intense blueness of the skies. The wind in the corn, then cutting to the protagonist's face, is but one example of how the director builds up the central enigma, and Behzad Dourani is successful at capturing the engineer's ambivalence: one moment aloof, the next warm. A powerful, mesmerising film where the surface details are redolent with meaning.