Abbas Kiarostami's 1997 film Taste of Cherry follows the middle-aged Badii as he drives around the outskirts of Tehran trying to enlist strangers in the task of helping him commit suicide. His plan is to take sleeping pills and lie down to die in a grave he has dug on a hillside. He wants someone to come by the next morning to fill it with earth or, if he is still alive, help him out.

As is quite typical of Kiarostami, the nature of Badii's plan is revealed piecemeal through his conversations with the people he encounters. The first exchange is with a man he overhears on a public telephone haggling over money, and who rebuffs him with a threat before he has time to make his offer (apparently mistaking Badii for someone cruising for sex). Then Badii encounters a man picking through trash for plastic bags to sell, refusing his proposition before really hearing it because, he says, he won't know how to help. The next exchange – which takes place after the opening titles – involves a young Kurdish soldier. Badii picks him up and drives him to show him the hillside on which he wants to die; when they arrive, the soldier runs for it. Badii encounters his next would-be assistant in the form of a security guard watching over what looks to be a quarry; he refuses Badii too, saying he cannot leave his post. Now Badii tries to convince the Afghan guard's friend; the young man – a seminarist – is disturbed by Badii's plan (“My hands do God's justice. What you want wouldn't be just”). A bizarre and unsettling sequence then ensues: Badii steps out of his car and wanders around the quarry, staring with vacant intensity as mounds of dirt are dropped by earthmovers and rocks are conveyed and sorted by large machines, the images and sounds all taking on a strangely sickening material quality. After becoming almost entirely enveloped in a cloud of thick orange dust, Badii returns to his car at the urgings of a worried worker. When he closes the door we are surprised to see him start speaking to a passenger.