Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami (22 June 1940 – 4 July 2016) worked as an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer. He began making films in 1970 and contributed to more than forty projects, including short films and documentaries. Kiarostami earned critical praise for directing the Koker trilogy (1987–1994), Close-Up (1990), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Taste of Cherry (1997), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. Later works Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012) marked his first films shot outside Iran, in Italy and Japan.

In a 2018 BBC Culture critics' poll, Where Is the Friend's House? (1987), Close-Up, and The Wind Will Carry Us were ranked among the 100 best foreign films. Close-Up also appeared on the 2012 Sight & Sound decennial poll as one of the 50 greatest movies of all time. He is broadly considered one of the most significant and influential filmmakers from Iran and in cinema history.

Early life and background

Beyond directing, Kiarostami worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director, and producer, and also designed credit titles and promotional materials. He was a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. He belonged to the generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that began in the late 1960s and focused on poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling that addressed political and philosophical issues.

Themes of life and death

Kiarostami became known for using child protagonists, documentary-style narrative films, stories set in rural villages, and conversations that unfold inside cars with stationary mounted cameras. He frequently incorporated Persian poetry into dialogue, titles, and themes. His films feature notable ambiguity, an unusual blend of simplicity and complexity, and a mix of fictional and documentary elements. The concepts of change and continuity, along with themes of life and death, are central to his work.

Kiarostami was born in Tehran to a Persian family. His first artistic pursuit was painting, which he continued into his late teens; he won a painting competition at age 18 shortly before leaving home to study at the University of Tehran School of Fine Arts. He majored in painting and graphic design and supported his studies by working as a traffic policeman.

As a painter, designer, and illustrator, he worked in advertising during the 1960s, designing posters and creating commercials. Between 1962 and 1966, he shot around 150 advertisements for Iranian television. In the late 1960s, he began creating credit titles for films, including Gheysar by Masoud Kimiai, and illustrating children's books.

1970s

In 1970, when the Iranian New Wave began with Dariush Mehrjui's film Gāv, Kiarostami helped establish a filmmaking department at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon) in Tehran. The department's debut production, and Kiarostami's first film, was the twelve-minute The Bread and Alley (1970), a neorealistic short about a schoolboy confronting an aggressive dog. Breaktime followed in 1972. The department became one of Iran's most notable film studios, producing Kiarostami's films as well as acclaimed Persian films such as The Runner and Bashu, the Little Stranger.

During the 1970s, Kiarostami developed an individualistic filmmaking style. He described his first film as a difficult experience, working with a young child, a dog, and an unprofessional crew, with a cinematographer who complained because Kiarostami did not follow conventional filmmaking norms. After The Experience (1973), he released The Traveler (Mossafer) in 1974, which follows a troubled boy from a small city who scams friends and neighbors to attend a football match in Tehran, only to face an ironic twist. The film examined human behavior and moral balance, and furthered Kiarostami's reputation for realism, diegetic simplicity, stylistic complexity, and his interest in physical and spiritual journeys.

In 1975, he directed two short films, So Can I and Two Solutions for One Problem. In early 1976, he released Colors, followed by the fifty-four-minute A Wedding Suit, about three teenagers in conflict over a suit. He then directed Report (1977), a 112-minute film about a tax collector accused of accepting bribes, with suicide among its themes. In 1979, he produced and directed First Case, Second Case.

1980s

In the early 1980s, Kiarostami directed several short films, including Toothache (1980), Orderly or Disorderly (1981), and The Chorus (1982). In 1983, he directed Fellow Citizen.

He began gaining recognition outside Iran with Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), a simple account of an eight-year-old schoolboy's quest to return a friend's notebook in a neighboring village to prevent his friend's expulsion. These films laid the groundwork for his later work.