Abbas Kiarostami

Kiarostami studied Fine Arts at Tehran University. His film career began at the age of 30 with the neorealist short film El pan y la calle , a style that he would repeat two years later in the same format with La hora del recreo , from 1972. His first feature, El viajero, premiered in 1974 and is about a boy’s journey to see the national team’s soccer match in Tehran. With this work, the director delves into the world of childhood, something he has also done with Where is my friend’s house? and Homework . All of them display a writing close to that of Roberto Rossellini .

However, the works that placed him as a reference within cinematographic modernism came in the 90s . Close-up , Through the olive trees or  The wind will take us blur the border between reality and fiction, and reflect on the film creation itself. . Undoubtedly, this metafilmic character was what caught the attention of critics and placed it on the international scene.

In The Taste of Cherries , the director makes us travel with a middle-aged man who wants to commit suicide and is just looking for someone to help him and bury him. This film reflects on the meaning of existence and the will to live, and ends up leading to an apology for beauty, which can be found in something as trivial as the taste of a cherry. Although it starts from an apparently realistic premise, such as the elimination of any cinematographic artifice, it would not be crazy to affirm that in the end the film ends up reaching a kind of abstraction. This obsession with film nudity continued in 2002 with Ten, a work where he eliminated the staging. The film was shot with only a few static cameras located inside a car that portrayed ten different situations.

Since then, his films have caused a lot of controversy, as it could not be otherwise when one is dedicated to experimenting. This intention led him to correspond with the Spanish Víctor Erice as no one had ever done before: in digital video format. Thus, in these letters we can see how they honor each other through references to their respective works.

In 2010, he released Certified Copy , his first solo film shot outside of Iran, and in a language that is not his own. In it, the author addresses the theme of love through the relationship between an English writer and a French gallery owner who meet in southern Tuscany. The film’s protagonist, Juliette Binoche , received the Best Actress award at Cannes. After this work, Kiarostami ventured to shoot in Japan: the result came to light in 2012 under the title Like Someone in Love .

Some see in his cinema a kind of aesthetic theory; Others say that this intention was lost when the director became aware that he could make a living from cinema, and that what we have seen since the premiere of Five in 2003 is nothing more than a way of satisfying critics and festival goers. Be it one thing or another, the truth is that we are dealing with a different, deeply personal filmmaker who uses cinema as a space for reflection.