Background
Abbas Kiarostami was born on June 22, 1940, in Teheran, Iran, into the family of Ahmad Kiarostami and Zahra Kiarostami.
Palme d'Or
Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival
University of Tehran
Martin Scorsese and Abbas Kiarostami
Palme d'Or
Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival
filmmaker painter screenwriter
Abbas Kiarostami was born on June 22, 1940, in Teheran, Iran, into the family of Ahmad Kiarostami and Zahra Kiarostami.
Abbas's first artistic experience was painting, which he continued into his late teens, winning a painting competition at the age of 18 shortly before he left 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, Kiarostami worked in advertising in 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.
In 1969, when the Iranian New Wave began, Kiarostami helped set up a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) in Tehran. Its debut production, and Kiarostami's first film, was the twelve-minute “The Bread and Alley” (1970), a neo-realistic short film about a schoolboy's confrontation with an aggressive dog. “Breaktime” followed in 1972. The department became one of Iran's most noted film studios, producing not only Kiarostami's films, but acclaimed Persian films.
Following “The Experience” (1973), Kiarostami released “The Traveler” in 1974. It furthered Kiarostami's reputation for realism, diegetic simplicity, and stylistic complexity, as well as his fascination with physical and spiritual journeys. In 1975, Kiarostami 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 film “A Wedding Suit”, a story about three teenagers coming into conflict over a suit for a wedding. Kiarostami's first feature film was the 112-minute “Report” (1977). In 1979, he produced and directed “First Case, Second Case.”
In the early 1980s, Kiarostami directed several short films including “Toothache” (1980), “Orderly or Disorderly” (1981), and “The Chorus” (1982). It was not until his release of “Where Is the Friend's Home?” that he began to gain recognition outside Iran. These films created the basis of his later productions. In 1987, Kiarostami was involved in the screenwriting of “The Key”, which he edited but did not direct. In 1989, he released “Homework.”
Kiarostami's first film of the decade was “Close-Up” (1990), which narrates the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. Ranked #42 in British Film Institute's The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, “Close-Up” received praise from directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nanni Moretti and was released across Europe.
In 1992, Kiarostami directed “Life, and Nothing More...”, regarded by critics as the second film of the “Koker” trilogy. That year Kiarostami won a Prix Roberto Rossellini, the first professional film award of his career, for his direction of the film. The last film of that trilogy was “Through the Olive Trees” (1994), which expands a peripheral scene from “Life and Nothing More” into the central drama. Kiarostami next wrote the screenplays for “The Journey” and “The White Balloon” (1995), for his former assistant Jafar Panahi. Between 1995 and 1996, he was involved in the production of “Lumière and Company”, a collaboration with 40 other film directors.
Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) award at the Cannes Film Festival for “Taste of Cherry.” Kiarostami directed “The Wind Will Carry Us” in 1999, which won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice International Film Festival. An unusual feature of the movie is that many of the characters are heard but not seen; at least thirteen to fourteen speaking characters in the film are never seen.
In 2001, Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, traveled to Kampala, Uganda at the request of the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development, to film a documentary about programs assisting Ugandan orphans. He stayed for ten days and made “ABC Africa.” The trip was originally intended as a research in preparation for the filming, but Kiarostami ended up editing the entire film from the video footage shot there. The high number of orphans in Uganda has resulted from the deaths of parents in the AIDS epidemic. In 2003, Kiarostami directed Five, a poetic feature with no dialogue or characterization. It consists of five long shots of nature which are single-take sequences, shot with a hand-held DV camera, along the shores of the Caspian Sea.
Kiarostami produced “10 on Ten” (2004), a journal documentary that shares ten lessons on movie-making while he drives through the locations of his past films. The movie was shot on digital video with a stationary camera mounted inside the car, in a manner reminiscent of “Taste of Cherry” and “Ten.” In 2005 and 2006, he directed “The Roads of Kiarostam”i, a 32-minute documentary that reflects on the power of landscape, combining austere black-and-white photographs with poetic observations, engaging music with political subject matter. Also in 2005, Kiarostami contributed the central section to “Tickets”, a portmanteau film set on a train traveling through Italy.
In 2008, Kiarostami directed the feature “Shirin”, which features close-ups of many notable Iranian actresses and the French actress Juliette Binoche as they watch a film based on a partly mythological Persian romance tale of Khosrow and Shirin, with themes of female self-sacrifice. That summer, he directed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera “Così fan tutte” conducted by Christophe Rousset at Festival d'Aix-en-Provence starring with William Shimell. But the following year's performances at the English National Opera was impossible to direct because of refusal of permission to travel abroad from his country.
“Certified Copy” (2010), starring Juliette Binoche, was made in Tuscany and was Kiarostami's first film to be shot and produced outside Iran. The story of an encounter between a British man and a French woman, it was entered in competition for the Palme d'Or in the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Binoche won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance in the film. Kiarostami's pentultimate film, “Like Someone in Love”, set and shot in Japan, received largely positive reviews from critics.
Kiarostami, along with Jean Cocteau, Satyajit Ray, Derek Jarman, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, was a filmmaker who expressed himself in other genres, such as poetry, set designs, painting, or photography. They expressed their interpretation of the world and their understanding of our preoccupations and identities.
Kiarostami was a noted photographer and poet. A bilingual collection of more than 200 of his poems, “Walking with the Wind”, was published by Harvard University Press. His photographic work includes “Untitled Photographs”, a collection of over thirty photographs, mostly of snow landscapes, taken in his hometown Tehran, between 1978 and 2003. In 1999, he also published a collection of his poems.
Riccardo Zipoli, from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, has studied the relations and interconnections between Kiarostami's poems and his films. The results of the analysis reveal how Kiarostami's treatment of "uncertain reality" is similar in his poems and films. Kiarostami's poetry is reminiscent of the later nature poems of the Persian painter-poet, Sohrab Sepehri. On the other hand, the succinct allusion to philosophical truths without the need for deliberation, the non-judgmental tone of the poetic voice, and the structure of the poem — absence of personal pronouns, adverbs or over reliance on adjectives — gives much of this poetry a haikuesque characteristic.
Kiarostami's three volumes of original verse, plus his selections from classical and contemporary Persian poets, including Nima, Hafez, Rumi and Saadi, were translated into English in 2015 and were published in bilingual (Persian/English) editions by Sticking Place Books in New York.
In March 2016, Kiarostami was hospitalized due to intestinal bleeding and reportedly went into a coma after undergoing two operations. Sources, including a Ministry of Health and Medical Education spokesman, reported that Kiarostami was suffering from gastrointestinal cancer. In late June he left Iran for treatment in a Paris hospital, where he died on July 4, 2016. The week before his death, Kiarostami had been invited to join the Academy Awards in Hollywood as part of efforts to increase the diversity of its OSCAR judges. His body was returned to Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on July 8, 2016, while a crowd of Iranian film directors, actors, actresses, and other artists were in Tehran airport to pay their respects.
Kiarostami received worldwide acclaim for his work from both audiences and critics, and, in 1999, he was voted the most important film director of the 1990s by two international critics' polls. Four of his films were placed in the top six of Cinematheque Ontario's Best of the '90s poll. In 2006, The Guardian's panel of critics ranked Kiarostami as the best contemporary non-American film director.
Rain
From Five
Rain
Snow White
Snow White
Source Figure1 (Installation)
Installation of Seven Sycamore
From Five
Snow White
Snow White
Snow White
Snow White
Rain
Trees and Crows
Roads and Trees
Snow White
Snow White
The wall #1
Roads and Trees
Trees and Crows
The wall #4
From Five
The wall #5
Snow White
The road #1
The wall #7
Snow White
Roads and Trees
Close Up
Snow White
From Five
The road #2
Trees and Crows
The wall #38
The wall #3
The wall #19
Trees and Crows
The wall #2
The wall #42
Snow White
From Five
Snow White
Snow White
Snow White
Kiarostami's films are frequently seen as politically "escapist" or apolitical, a claim sometimes linked to a criticism in Iran that he made films for foreign audiences. He said that the politics in his films lied partly in his choice of subject matter or location - the rural poor, or Kurdish Iran - and believed cinema should ask questions, not answer them. "If political means partisan, I'd never make a political film; I'd never invite anyone to vote for one person or the opposition. I'm not pushing people to react, but trying to reach a truth of everyday life. As long as we try to touch this truth, it's essentially and profoundly political."
Unlike other directors, Kiarostami showed no interest in staging extravagant combat scenes or complicated chase scenes in large-scale productions, instead attempting to mold the medium of film to his own specifications. Kiarostami's cinema offers a different definition of film. According to film professors such as Jamsheed Akrami of William Paterson University, Kiarostami consistently tried to redefine film by forcing the increased involvement of the audience. In his later years, he also progressively trimmed the timespan within his films.
Quotations:
"We can never get close to the truth except through lying."
"When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground, and transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit. And if it does, the fruit will not be as good as it was in its original place. This is a rule of nature. I think if I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree."
"I’m not a political analyst. I recognize, like everyone else, a reality: a large part of the population, among them a majority of young people, went into the street and opened their arms in the face of bullets. That was never seen before in Iran, even during the 1979 revolution. It’s a totally unprecedented movement. There’s obviously a popular revolt and angry youth who are sacrificing themselves in the name of the freedom that’s being denied them."
Kiarostami was a part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and includes pioneering directors such as Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi.
Physical Characteristics: Kiarostami frequently appeared wearing dark-lensed spectacles or sunglasses. He wore them for medical reasons due to a sensitivity to light.
In 1969, Kiarostami married Parvin Amir-Gholi. They had two sons, Ahmad and Bahman. The couple divorced in 1982.
