Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami
عباس کیارستمی
Kiarostami in 2013
Born	(1940-06-22)22 June 1940 Tehran, Imperial State of Iran
Died	4 July 2016(2016-07-04) (aged 76) Paris, France
Burial place	Tok Mazra'eh Cemetery, Lavasan, Shemiranat, Iran
Alma mater	University of Tehran
Occupations	Filmmaker photographer producer painter poet
Years active	1962–2016
Notable work	Where Is the Friend's Home? Close-Up Through the Olive Trees Taste of Cherry The Wind Will Carry Us
Style	Documentary minimalism poetry film
Movement	Iranian New Wave
Spouse	Parvin Amir-Gholi ​ ​ (m. 1969; div. 1982)​ [1]
Children	Ahmad Bahman
Signature

Abbas Kiarostami (Persian: عباس کیارستمی [ʔæbˌbɒːs kijɒːɾostæˈmi] ^ⓘ; 22 June 1940 – 4 July 2016) was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer.^[2][3][4] An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy (1987–1994), Close-Up (1990), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Taste of Cherry (1997), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. In later works, Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012), he filmed for the first time outside Iran: in Italy and Japan, respectively. His films Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Close-Up, and The Wind Will Carry Us were ranked among the 100 best foreign films in a 2018 critics' poll by BBC Culture.^[5] Close-Up was also ranked one of the 50 greatest movies of all time in the famous decennial Sight & Sound poll conducted in 2012.^[6][7]

Kiarostami had worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director, and producer and had designed credit titles and publicity material. He was also a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. He was part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and emphasized the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues.^[8]

Kiarostami had a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary-style narrative films,^[9] for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. He is also known for his use of Persian poetry in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films. Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often a mix of fictional and documentary elements. The concepts of change and continuity, in addition to the themes of life and death, play a major role in Kiarostami's works.