Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) stands as one of Iran’s greatest filmmakers. His meditative, poetic cinema blurred fiction and reality. Explore his early life, career, cinematic philosophy, legacy, and memorable quotations.
Introduction
Abbas Kiarostami was a visionary Iranian director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and artist whose work reshaped the contours of world cinema. His films—sparse, contemplative, and boundary-dissolving—frequently merge documentary and narrative in ways that challenge how we perceive reality, authorship, and the everyday. Often working under constraints of censorship, he cultivated a subtle, deeply human cinema that has inspired filmmakers globally.
Early Life and Family
Abbas Kiarostami was born on 22 June 1940 in Tehran, Iran. He studied at the University of Tehran, Faculty of Fine Arts, focusing on painting. Before fully entering cinema, he worked as a graphic designer, art director, and designer of film credits and commercials. In the 1960s, he became involved with Kanoon – the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Institute for children’s intellectual development), where he helped found the film department.
He had two sons: Ahmad Kiarostami and Bahman Kiarostami (born 1978), the latter of whom is also a filmmaker.
Kiarostami died on 4 July 2016 in Paris, France, after receiving medical treatment abroad. He was 76.
Youth, Artistic Formation & Early Work
Kiarostami’s grounding was in visual art. His training as a painter and graphic artist deeply informed his cinematic eye. Working in design, credits, and commercials gave him technical familiarity with image, composition, editing, and visual rhythm.
In 1970, he made his first short film, The Bread and Alley (“Nan va Koutcheh”), for Kanoon. His early films were often pedagogical, minimalist, and rooted in everyday reality—concerned with children, rural life, and modest events.
These small, usually non-commercial works allowed him to experiment with film language and to find a mode of “naked reality” rather than constructed spectacle.
Cinematic Career & Major Works
The Koker Trilogy & Early Maturation
One of Kiarostami’s formative achievements is the Koker Trilogy, a loosely linked set of films centered around the village of Koker in northern Iran.
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Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) marked a turning point.
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And Life Goes On (1992) (sometimes translated Life, and Nothing More…) continues reflection after the 1990 Manjil earthquake.
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Through the Olive Trees (1994) wraps narrative around the making of And Life Goes On. The trilogy blurs boundaries between film and reality.
Breakthrough & International Acclaim
Close-Up (1990) is one of his most celebrated works. It dramatizes and documents a real event: a man impersonating filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, tricking a family into thinking they'd be in a film. Kiarostami involved the real participants in re-enactments. It is often cited as a landmark in docufiction and self-reflexive cinema.
Taste of Cherry (1997) — for which Kiarostami won the Palme d’Or at Cannes — deepened existential themes about life, death, and human connection.
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) is another masterwork: a city journalist travels to a rural village expecting to document mourning rituals, but is forced into patience and attentiveness.
Later, Kiarostami made films outside Iran:
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Certified (2010) (in France / Italy)
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Like Someone in Love (2012) (in Japan)
Across his career, he directed over 40 films (shorts, features, documentaries).
He also was a poet and photographer. His poetry collection Walking with the Wind is bilingual and collects more than 200 poems.
Style, Themes & Cinematic Philosophy
Realism, Minimalism & Poetic Ambiguity
Kiarostami often embraced minimalism: long takes, sparse dialogue, real or non-professional actors, and ambient silence or natural sound. He blurred the line between fiction and documentary, frequently inserting meta layers: characters aware of cameras, re-enactments, or references to filmmaking itself.
He resisted emotional manipulation; his films invite contemplation rather than prescribing meaning. He said: “I don’t like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice.”
In his work, landscapes, light, silence, and waiting are as meaningful as human gestures. Many scenes dwell on the moments between action.
Authority, Voice & Participation
Kiarostami’s films often challenge the notion of a single authorial voice. The viewer becomes implicated in constructing meaning. He plays with power dynamics: between filmmaker and subject, viewer and film, authority and resistance.
He saw cinema as a “link between our culture and what we can actually produce.”
He also valued restraint: letting silence and absence speak. One of his remarks: “Good cinema is what we can believe … what is important is whether the audience accepts it as real.”
Legacy and Influence
Abbas Kiarostami is widely regarded as a towering figure in world cinema and a central figure of the Iranian New Wave.
His work influenced directors globally who seek poetic, meditative, minimalist cinema rather than spectacle.
He helped open space for Iranian film on the global stage, even under censorship, showing how ambiguity, suggestion, and indirectness can convey powerful truths.
Critics and other filmmakers praised him: Jean-Luc Godard is said to have remarked the cinema ends with Kiarostami. Martin Scorsese also praised him: “Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema.”
His cross-disciplinary sensibility (painting, poetry, photography) bridged forms, reminding that cinema is not just storytelling but image, time, silence.
His death in 2016 was mourned globally, and retrospectives, festivals, and scholarly work continue to explore his films’ depths.
Famous Quotes
Here are some notable quotations from Abbas Kiarostami:
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“Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can’t believe.”
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“What you see and believe in is very much what I’m interested in.”
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“We are nothing but a link between our culture and what we can actually produce.”
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“I spend a lot of time doing carpentry. Sometimes there is nothing that gives me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does.”
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“Light: the greatest painter and photographer of all. At every single moment of our lives we see different images, different pictures.”
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“A tree doesn’t feel a duty to start doing something about the earth from which it comes. A tree just has to bear fruit, and leaves and blossoms.”
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“I don’t mind people sleeping during my films … some very good films might prepare you for sleeping or falling asleep.”
These lines reflect his humility, his aesthetic sense, and his philosophy of spacing, rest, and observation.
Lessons from Abbas Kiarostami
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Less can be more
In storytelling, restraint, silence, and suggestion often carry deeper weight than layered spectacle. -
Blurred boundaries invite participation
When the viewer shares responsibility in constructing meaning, the film becomes alive and open. -
Art under constraint can deepen creativity
Working under censorship or social limits pushed Kiarostami to subtlety, metaphor, and indirect modes—paradoxically expanding expressive power. -
Multidisciplinarity enriches vision
His grounding in painting, design, poetry, and photography infused his films with visual and temporal sensitivity. -
Patience is cinematic
His films often demand slowing down, attending to the interstices of life, the pauses between action, the lingering of light and shadow.
Conclusion
Abbas Kiarostami remains not merely a “great Iranian filmmaker” but a transformative force in cinema worldwide. His films do not tell you what to think—they invite you to inhabit a perception, to dwell in ambiguity, to see the poetic in the quotidian. His legacy reminds us that film can be less about spectacle and more about attention, about how we live among images, silence, waiting, and transformation.