Abbas Kiarostami

The filmmaker who erased the line

Kiarostami is the great modern argument that documentary and fiction are the same lie told at different distances. "We can never get close to the truth except through lying" was his working creed, and no one built more rigorous cinema on so paradoxical a foundation. He shot with stationary cameras, non-actors, dirt roads and long conversations in moving cars, and out of those deliberately impoverished means made films that keep folding back on their own making — a boy searching for a friend's house, an impostor confessing to impersonating a director, a crew returning to a village to film the earthquake that levelled it. The minimalism is not asceticism for its own sake. It is a philosophical position: strip away the machinery of illusion and what remains is a truer, stranger kind of fiction.

Tehran to Kanoon

Born in Tehran on June 22, 1940, Kiarostami came to cinema through the eye, not the script. He trained as a painter and graphic designer at the University of Tehran's School of Fine Arts, spent the 1960s making some 150 television commercials and designing film titles, and only in 1970 turned to directing — founding the filmmaking department of Kanoon, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. His debut there, the twelve-minute The Bread and Alley (1970), set the template: children, a real street, no condescension. From that institutional cradle came the Koker trilogy — Where is the Friend's Home? (1987), Life, and Nothing More... (1992), and Through the Olive Trees (1994) — three films that circle a single mountain region and the 1990 earthquake that struck it, each one quietly dismantling the frame the last had built. International acclaim followed: Close-Up (1990), then Taste of Cherry (1997), which took the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Late in life he filmed abroad for the first time — Certified Copy (2010) in Italy, Like Someone in Love (2012) in Japan — before dying in Paris on July 4, 2016.

What the numbers say

Our library ranks Kiarostami #34 among all directors, composite 16.50 across fifteen titles — high, but carried almost entirely by one film. Taste of Cherry sits at #57 (4.03, on 11 of our source lists), and then the drop is a cliff: Close-Up at #150 (3.01), Where is the Friend's Home? at #387 and The Wind Will Carry Us at #459, Ten (2002) at #549, and the whole Koker back-half — Through the Olive Trees at #821, Life, and Nothing More... at #1256 — trailing badly. This is the aggregate flattening a career the specialists read as a continuous masterwork into a single festival trophy. To my eye the sources are behind on Close-Up, which is the more radical film and the one his admirers, Kurosawa among them, would defend hardest; Kurosawa said that after Satyajit Ray died he thanked God for Kiarostami to take his place.

Where to start

Close-Up first — it is the purest statement of everything he believed about lying toward the truth. Then Taste of Cherry for the long road and the unbearable question at the end of it, and Where is the Friend's Home? to watch the whole method begin, small and complete, with a boy and a notebook.