Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer and film producer, active from 1970 and involved in the production of over forty films. ¹ He attained critical acclaim for 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, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of Iran, and of all time. ^{1 2} No source used for this record attests a personal religion for him, so his data record leaves his faith as unknown. ^{1 3}

Kiarostami was born in Tehran on 22 June 1940 to a Persian family. ^{1 2} His first artistic experience was painting, which he pursued into his late teens, winning a painting competition at 18; he majored in painting and graphic design at the University of Tehran's School of Fine Arts and supported his studies by working as a traffic policeman. ¹ In the 1960s he worked in advertising, shooting around 150 advertisements for Iranian television between 1962 and 1966, and in the late 1960s he began creating credit titles for films and illustrating children's books. ¹

In 1970 Kiarostami helped set up a filmmaking department at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon) in Tehran; its debut production, and his first film, was the twelve-minute Bread and Alley (1970), about a schoolboy's confrontation with an aggressive dog. ^{1 2} The department became one of Iran's most noted film studios. ¹ In the 1970s he made The Traveler (1974), about a boy determined to reach a football match in Tehran, and Report (1977), about a tax collector accused of accepting bribes, and he was one of the few directors who remained in Iran after the 1979 revolution, when many of his peers fled. ¹ He later explained that decision with the image of a transplanted tree: "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... I think if I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree." ¹

Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), about an eight-year-old's quest to return his friend's notebook in a neighbouring village, brought him recognition outside Iran. ¹ It is grouped by critics with And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994) as the Koker trilogy, after the village of Koker in northern Iran, the three films relating to the 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake in which 40,000 people died, and using the themes of life, death, change and continuity. ¹ Close-Up (1990), the part-documentary, part-staged story of a man who impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, was ranked among the 50 greatest films of all time in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll. ¹ In 1995 and 1996 he wrote the screenplay for Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon. ¹

Taste of Cherry (1997), the drama of a man determined to commit suicide who seeks someone to bury him, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, shared with Shohei Imamura's The Eel. ^{1 2} The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), set in a remote Kurdish village, won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice. ¹ Ten (2002), filmed with dashboard cameras in a car driven through Tehran, was praised as an experiment in digital micro-cinema, and Shirin (2008) filmed notable Iranian actresses and Juliette Binoche watching a film of the romance of Khosrow and Shirin. ¹

Certified Copy (2010), made in Tuscany with Juliette Binoche, who won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for it, was Kiarostami's first film shot and produced outside Iran. ¹ Like Someone in Love (2012), set and shot in Japan, was his last completed feature; his final film, 24 Frames, built from 24 of his still photographs, was released posthumously in 2017. ¹ He served on juries at many festivals, including Cannes in 1993, 2002 and 2005, and presided over Cannes juries in 2005 and 2014. ¹

Kiarostami was also 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, and his photographic work includes Untitled Photographs, mostly snow landscapes taken in Tehran between 1978 and 2003. ¹ His films are known for child protagonists, documentary-style narratives, stories in rural villages, conversations inside cars, Persian poetry in dialogue and titles, and an ambiguity mixing fictional and documentary elements; he stated, "We can never get close to the truth except through lying." ¹ Critics have compared his austere, poetic style to those of Satyajit Ray, Vittorio De Sica, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Tati, and some read his work through Sufi concepts, while other critics rate the influence of spirituality in his films as lower — a debate among critics about his themes, recorded here as such. ¹

Kiarostami married Parvin Amir-Gholi in 1969; they had two sons, Ahmad and Bahman, and divorced in 1982. ^{1 3} He was treated in Tehran from March 2016 for gastrointestinal illness, travelled in late June to a Paris hospital, and died there on 4 July 2016, aged 76, a week after receiving an invitation to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; his body was returned to Tehran and he was buried in Lavasan, in accordance with his will. ^{1 2} This paragraph sets out the dispute over his treatment as the sources report it; it is not a verdict by the museum. Before his death, his friend Mohammad Shirvani quoted him as saying of his medical team, "They destroyed it [his digestive system]", and a campaign was set up to investigate possible medical error; his eldest son Ahmad denied any medical error at that time. ¹ Nine days after his death his family issued a formal complaint of medical maltreatment, and the head of the Iranian Medical Council wrote to his French counterpart seeking the medical file; Iran's Medical Council later announced, on the basis of a copy obtained from an alternative source, that he had died of a massive meningeal haemorrhage caused by an overdose of the anticoagulant heparin, criticised the Paris hospital for not cooperating, and a Tehran court acquitted his Iranian medical team of the negligence allegations. ¹

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