Abbas Kiarostami
Based on Wikipedia: Abbas Kiarostami
In 1990, a man was arrested in Tehran for impersonating a famous film director. He had convinced an entire family that he was Mohsen Makhmalbaf, that they would star in his next picture, that their lives were about to change. When the police finally caught up with him, they expected to uncover a con artist plotting theft. What they found instead was something far stranger: a man named Hossein Sabzian who claimed he had deceived the family not for money, but because pretending to be a filmmaker allowed him to feel, for a brief moment, like he mattered.
Abbas Kiarostami made a movie about this. He called it Close-Up, and it would eventually be ranked among the fifty greatest films ever made.
This is how Kiarostami worked. He found stories that seemed impossibly simple on the surface—a boy trying to return a notebook, a man searching for someone to bury him after he kills himself, a series of conversations in a car—and transformed them into profound meditations on existence itself. He made films that looked like documentaries but weren't quite, that felt like fiction but couldn't entirely be. He confused and delighted critics in equal measure. And he did almost all of this from inside a country that, for much of his career, was largely isolated from the rest of the world.
The Painter Who Became a Filmmaker
Kiarostami was born in Tehran in 1940, and his first love was painting. He was good at it too—good enough to win a national competition at eighteen, just before leaving home to study at the University of Tehran's School of Fine Arts. To pay his way through school, he worked as a traffic policeman, standing at intersections directing cars while dreaming of canvases.
After graduating, he drifted into advertising. Throughout the 1960s, he designed posters, illustrated children's books, and shot commercials—around 150 of them for Iranian television between 1962 and 1966. He also began creating opening credit sequences for other directors' films. It was steady work, creative enough to keep him engaged, but not yet the thing that would define his life.
That changed in 1970.
A new movement was stirring in Iranian cinema. It would come to be called the Iranian New Wave, and it began with a film called Gāv (The Cow) directed by Dariush Mehrjui. These filmmakers rejected the glossy melodramas that had dominated Persian cinema. Instead, they wanted to make something real—films with poetic dialogue, allegorical storytelling, and a willingness to grapple with philosophical questions that commercial movies typically avoided.
Kiarostami found his entry point through an unlikely institution: a children's organization. When the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (known by its Persian acronym Kanun) decided to establish a filmmaking department, Kiarostami helped set it up. His first film was a twelve-minute piece called The Bread and Alley, a deceptively simple story about a schoolboy confronting an aggressive dog on his way home.
It was, by his own admission, a difficult shoot. He worked with a very young child, an unpredictable dog, and an inexperienced crew. His cinematographer complained constantly that Kiarostami wasn't following proper filmmaking conventions.
He wasn't. And he never would.
The Philosophy of Simplicity
What made Kiarostami's films so distinctive? Start with what they looked like. He favored long takes, stationary cameras, and natural lighting. He shot in real locations—dusty villages, cramped apartments, the interiors of cars. His actors were often non-professionals, sometimes playing versions of themselves. His dialogue could feel improvised, even when it wasn't.
But the simplicity was deceptive. Underneath these unadorned surfaces, Kiarostami was asking enormous questions. What is the relationship between fiction and reality? How do we find meaning in the face of death? What obligations do we have to one another?
He was also doing something technically innovative that most viewers never noticed. He would blur the line between documentary and fiction so thoroughly that even attentive audiences couldn't always tell which was which. In Close-Up, the man who impersonated the director plays himself in recreations of his own crime. The real family he deceived also appears. So does the real director he impersonated. The trial scenes are actual footage from the actual courtroom. Yet the whole thing is shaped and structured like a narrative film.
This mixing of real and staged elements became one of Kiarostami's signatures. Another was his use of cars. An astonishing number of his most important scenes take place inside automobiles, shot with cameras mounted to the dashboard or windshield. There's something about being in a car—the forced intimacy of a confined space, the landscape scrolling past the windows, the way conversation flows differently when you're not facing each other—that Kiarostami understood better than perhaps any filmmaker who ever lived.
A critic once called him "among the world masters of automotive cinema." It sounds like a joke, but it wasn't.
The Koker Trilogy
In 1987, Kiarostami released Where Is the Friend's House?, and everything changed. The film tells the story of an eight-year-old boy named Ahmad who accidentally takes his classmate's notebook home from school. This matters because their teacher has warned that any student who fails to do homework in the proper notebook will be expelled. Ahmad must return it, but his friend lives in another village, and the adults in Ahmad's life keep getting in his way.
That's it. That's the plot. A boy tries to return a notebook.
Yet from this almost absurdly minimal premise, Kiarostami crafted something haunting. The film captures the way children experience the world—how enormous small problems feel, how incomprehensible adult priorities seem, how a winding path through the countryside can feel like an epic journey. International critics took notice. For the first time, Kiarostami had an audience beyond Iran.
Three years later, a catastrophic earthquake struck the Manjil-Rudbar region of northern Iran. Forty thousand people died. Among the villages in the affected area was Koker, where Kiarostami had filmed Where Is the Friend's House?
Kiarostami drove into the devastated region, searching for the child actors from his film. Were they alive? Had they survived? This journey became the basis for his next movie, Life, and Nothing More (1992), in which a filmmaker and his son travel through the earthquake zone looking for two boys. The film is about grief and resilience, about how people carry on living amid unimaginable loss. It won Kiarostami his first major international prize.
Then came Through the Olive Trees (1994), which expanded a minor moment from Life, and Nothing More into a full story. A young man repeatedly tries to get a young woman to acknowledge him; she refuses to speak. The film is about love and class and the strange alchemy of filmmaking.
Critics dubbed these three works "the Koker trilogy," though Kiarostami himself resisted the label. He thought Taste of Cherry, his 1997 film, belonged with the last two because all three explored the preciousness of life. But the Koker designation stuck, and for good reason. The three films are linked not just by geography but by their visual and thematic echoes. In one scene in Life, and Nothing More, the camera lingers on a zigzagging path—the same path the boy Ahmad climbed in the first film. For viewers who remembered, this moment landed with unexpected emotional force. The path still existed. The earthquake hadn't destroyed everything.
Taste of Cherry
In 1997, Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or at Cannes—the most prestigious prize in world cinema—for Taste of Cherry. It remains his most acclaimed and most controversial work.
The film follows a middle-aged man named Mr. Badii as he drives around the hills outside Tehran, searching for someone willing to do him a peculiar favor. He has dug a grave for himself. Tonight, he plans to swallow sleeping pills and lie down in it. What he needs is someone to come by in the morning, check whether he's dead, and if so, shovel dirt over his body. If he's still alive, the person should help him out.
Mr. Badii approaches various passengers—a young soldier, a seminary student, an elderly taxidermist—and each responds differently to his request. The soldier flees in terror. The seminarian argues that suicide is forbidden by Islam. The taxidermist agrees to help, but first tells a story about a time he almost killed himself, and what stopped him.
Kiarostami never explains why Mr. Badii wants to die. We never learn his backstory, his specific grief, the particular circumstance that brought him to this point. This frustrated some viewers and critics enormously. But it was entirely deliberate. Kiarostami wasn't interested in the psychology of one individual character. He was interested in the larger question: What makes life worth living?
The film ends with one of the most debated sequences in modern cinema. After Mr. Badii takes the pills and lies down in his grave, the screen goes black. Then, suddenly, we see grainy video footage of the cast and crew filming on location, joking around, going about the business of making a movie. Is this a happy ending? A refusal of resolution? A statement about the artificiality of film itself? Critics have argued about it for nearly three decades.
A Filmmaker Without a Country
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kiarostami occupied an unusual position. He was internationally celebrated—winning prizes at every major festival, hailed by directors like Martin Scorsese and Jean-Luc Godard as one of the essential filmmakers of his era—yet he remained based in Iran, a country under heavy international sanctions and largely cut off from Western cultural exchange.
This isolation shaped his work in complex ways. He couldn't use certain technologies. He had limited access to foreign films. He faced censorship from the Iranian government, which forced him to work obliquely, to embed his social commentary in allegory and implication. Yet these constraints also gave his films their distinctive quality. Because he couldn't rely on special effects or Hollywood-style production values, he had to find other ways to create meaning. Because he couldn't address political issues directly, he developed a method of filmmaking that was endlessly suggestive, that invited viewers to read between the lines.
In 2001, he traveled to Uganda to make a documentary about children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. He had only intended to do research, to scout locations for a future project. But the footage he shot was so compelling that he edited it into a feature film, ABC Africa. It was one of his most optimistic works—a film about death that kept finding reasons to celebrate life.
The following year, he made Ten, a film composed entirely of conversations inside a car. A woman drives through Tehran over several days, picking up various passengers: her demanding son, her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute, a jilted bride. There are no exterior shots, no cutaways, no traditional dramatic structure. Just ten conversations, each one revealing something about women's lives in contemporary Iran.
In 2008, he directed a Mozart opera in France. He was invited to direct it again the following year in London, but the Iranian government refused him permission to travel.
The Final Works
In 2010, Kiarostami finally made a film outside Iran. Certified Copy was shot in Tuscany, starring the French actress Juliette Binoche (who would win Best Actress at Cannes for her performance) and the British baritone William Shimell. It tells the story of a chance encounter between a writer and an antique dealer, but halfway through, something strange happens. The characters begin to behave as if they've been married for fifteen years. Did their relationship transform? Were they playing roles? Was the entire first half of the film a game?
Critics divided sharply. Some found it brilliant, an exploration of authenticity and performance. Others found it frustrating and contrived. This was typical of Kiarostami—his films tended to provoke strong reactions in both directions.
His next film, Like Someone in Love (2012), was set in Japan. It too explored questions of identity and deception, following an elderly professor, a young call girl, and the violent boyfriend who becomes suspicious of their relationship.
These would be his last completed works as a filmmaker, though not quite his final statement. After his death in 2016, an experimental project he had been working on was released posthumously. 24 Frames took twenty-four of Kiarostami's still photographs and brought them to life through subtle digital animation. Snow falls. Waves lap. Birds take flight. Nothing much happens, and yet everything does. Critics received it rapturously.
The Legacy of Looking
What was Kiarostami ultimately trying to do? Different critics have different answers, but one theme runs through nearly everything he made: the importance of paying attention.
His films teach viewers to look more carefully. That long shot of a zigzagging path isn't just pretty—it's telling you something about persistence, about the way humans have shaped the landscape, about the connection between different moments in time. That conversation in a car isn't just dialogue—it's revealing how people actually talk, how intimacy works, how we circle around the things we really mean to say.
Kiarostami once gave away a lifetime achievement award. He received the Akira Kurosawa Prize at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2000, and rather than keep it, he handed it to a veteran Iranian actor named Behrooz Vossoughi. It was a characteristic gesture—a reminder that filmmaking is collaborative, that directors depend on actors and technicians and institutions, that individual achievement matters less than the collective work of a culture.
He worked with children more than almost any major filmmaker. He returned again and again to rural villages. He shot conversations in cars because he understood that cars are where modern people actually spend their time, actually have their most honest exchanges. He made films that could be called documentaries but weren't quite, that could be called fiction but weren't exactly. He won the Palme d'Or for a movie about suicide that some people found life-affirming and others found unbearably bleak.
He was, in other words, doing something genuinely new. Not recycling techniques from earlier eras, not copying Hollywood formulas, not even following the conventions that his own Iranian New Wave colleagues had established. He invented a form that was entirely his own.
Jafar Panahi, another great Iranian filmmaker, worked as Kiarostami's assistant before launching his own career. Kiarostami wrote the screenplay for Panahi's first feature, The White Balloon. The two directors shared a commitment to realism, to stories set in everyday Iran, to the idea that cinema could capture truth by seeming simple while actually being extraordinarily complex.
When Kiarostami died in Paris in 2016 at the age of seventy-six, he left behind more than forty films, a body of poetry, a career as a photographer and graphic designer, and an influence that continues to shape how filmmakers around the world think about their craft. He had shown that you didn't need expensive equipment or special effects or even conventional narrative structure to make movies that mattered. You needed a camera, a location, someone willing to talk, and an understanding that the space between what's real and what's staged is where the most interesting things happen.
He made films about life and death, about children and adults, about Iran and the wider world. He made them with patience and care and a refusal to give audiences easy answers. And he made them, against considerable odds, from a country that most Westerners couldn't find on a map—proving that great art can come from anywhere, as long as someone is willing to look hard enough to find it.
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