Invited by the United Nations to study the endeavors of the Uganda Women's Effort to Save Orphans, Kiarostami and his collaborator Seifollah Samadian initially went to the country to scout locations for a feature-length film. However, when the pair returned home and examined the more than twenty hours of digital footage shot on digital video with a handheld video camera over the course of ten days, they decided their material was worth editing into the feature-length film. For Kiarostami, this film was a return to his early themes of resilient children in the face of adversity,[2] but for the first time it was outside his homeland with a more versatile format.