In the press kit released with Ten, Kiarostami invokes a story by Milan Kundera:

Kiarostami must be referring back to this when, in the 2005 film Around Five: Reflections on Film and the Making of Five, he refers to Five as a ‘one-word film’: if Ten was an example of ‘two-word cinema’, Five takes its minimalist tendency even further. If in the spirit of this we were to give the five episodes titles, we might end up with something like: ‘wood’; ‘esplanade’; ‘dogs’; ‘ducks’; ‘moon’. The first episode follows a piece of wood floating on small waves, which alternately push it up onto a beach and drag it back down into the shallow water. The second presents an esplanade littered with puddles of rainwater backgrounded by a distant beach where larger waves break; over the course of the episode, we watch a number of people (plus the occasional pigeon) walking past, and observe a conversation between a group of four old men. The third episode gives us another seaside scene, this time with a number of dark shapes – eventually revealing themselves as dogs – silhouetted in front of the waves. The fourth stands out for its comedy: here hundreds of ducks – proceeding in a long queue – waddle across a beach, only to turn around and come back again. The final episode offers a view from above of water at night reflecting a full moon, the sounds of toads, birds, a rooster, and a dog, the slow brewing of a thunderstorm, and eventually dawn. The movie is more than an ode to calm, the beauty of nature, and the dignity and drama of the ordinary (even if it is also that): it opens beguiling problems of cinematic truth and artifice.