Abbas Kiarostami, the world's most celebrated Iranian filmmaker, passed away on Monday 4 July in Paris; his body was returned to Tehran, his birthplace, on Friday. Kiarostami had been suffering from cancer form many years. Cinema started in Iran — in Tehran, as it did in many other Asian countries — at the turn of the 20th century, a few years after it was invented in Europe. But Iranian cinema did not establish itself globally until Kiarostami and his generation began being noticed in the west. Of the various classifications of Iranian cinema the most useful is the division into pre- and post-Revolution films. No doubt politics played an essential role in placing Iranian society in the spotlight, following the vicissitudes of a formerly imperial monarchy turned into a pseudo-theocracy, and an open society turned into an extremist one. Curiosity about such a place clearly contributed to western interest in the cultural production of Iranians, but Kiarostami — for one — turned out to be among the most important filmmakers who managed to create a cinema that worked not only as a reference point for the Iranian intellectual and cultural life but also as art of universal value that goes past all geographic and cultural borders. Born in 1940, Kiarostami studied art and started his life as an artist and graphic designer; he made his first films — short documentaries, starting with The Bread and the Alley — when he worked at the Centre for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Kiarostami soon began to make longer fiction films, but he instituted a system for developing his artistic approach by, among other things, using non-professional actors from the environment in which he was filming, taking fictional realism to impressive documentary extremes. The viewer is completely convinced this can only be happening in reality. In 1987 Kiarostami made his remarkable film Where Is My Friend's Home?, which would go on to win the Bronze Leopard and a FIPRESCI Special Mention at the 1989 Locarno Film Festival. Presenting a purely human situation, Kiarostami depicts the psychological pressure to which primary school students are subjected in remote and poor provinces of the country, showing the huge distances they must travel uncomfortably and the abject conditions in which they live only peripherally and in the course of the story. The classroom teacher is a truly terrifying authority figure, something that is clearly demonstrated when one of the students forgets to bring in the exercise book in which he should have done his homework. The film revolves around the hero — one such student — arriving home to realise, tragically, that he accidentally took along his classmate's exercise book, and determining to look for his classmate's house so as to give him it back to him and spare him the humiliation of being the object of the teacher's quiet wrath the next day. Here as in his other films Kiarostami is less interested in developing dramatic action than in the hero's journey as such: the journey is what reveals both the human condition and the cultural and social context. In Life and Nothing More (1992), the hero is Kiarostami himself as the film director trekking to a mountain village where a widely publicised earthquake had destroyed a large part of Iran, killing thousands. The director is seen driving his small car with his small son, progressing to a location where he had made a documentary about this village and its children some years before. There are subtle, indefinite references to Where Is My Friend's House?. Once again it is the journey that reveals the tragic damage that nature has done to human life. One of the film's most beautiful scenes takes place when the director leaves his son asleep in the car to urinate by the side of the road at the edge of a wood so stark and leafless its trees look like giant thorns. While doing his business he hears the crying of a baby which he follows to a hammock, where he plays with the baby till it is quiet — the mother appears gathering wood in the distance. Then the director's own son, having woken, cries out for his father — prompting him to return running to the car. Without having a direct connection with the main journey and all the terribly realistic suffering it reveals, the scene communicates much about life. It is a philosophical abstraction of the human condition: children weeping because they are left alone in the wilderness. This philosophical compression of the human condition is even more evident in Kiarostami's better known Taste of Cherries, which won the Palme d'Or in 1997. It is the story of a man using his four-wheel drive to search all through the country for someone to help him carry out his decision to kill himself. He has it all clearly planned: he will take an overdose of sleeping pills and lie down in a hole by a tree at a remote spot; all that the accomplice has to do is fill in the impromptu grave, covering him with dust after dawn. The film pays absolutely no attention to the tragedy that drove the man to plan this out; Kiarostami is only interested in the journey, the search for humanity, never any purpose as such. On the way the man encounters many archetypes: a young and timid army conscript, a suspicious quarry worker, an Afghan religious scholar... It is they who give life its meaning — its cherry taste. The film ends with a Brechtian scene in which the hero, having eased himself into the hole in the dark, handing Abbas Kiarostami himself a cigarette; they are surrounded by the film crew, recording the conscripts' morning parade. But Kiarostami is fascinated with creative people, and many of his heroes are, like himself, auteurs. In his first film to be made outside Iran, Certified Copy (2010) – which was screened in the Cannes official competition, and for which Juliette Binoche received the best actress award — the hero is a writer. In his 1990 film Close Up, he retells with extreme realism and warmth the real-life story of a man who, claiming to be the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, attempts to defraud a well-off family in Tehran. Kiarostami uses the real-life hero in parts as well as scenes from his trial. But the most moving scene occurs at the end when the real Makhmalbaf on his motor bike picks up the fake Makhmalbaf bearing a bunch of flowers and they had to the family to apologise. More experimental is Shirin (screened outside the competition at the 2008 Venice Film Festival) in which close-ups of the faces of 114 actresses, including Binoche, are seen responding to an invisible film they are watching, with numerous emotions reflected; at the end they break down in tears. Kiarostami says he had not settled on a soundtrack when he filmed but eventually chose part of a the quintessential Farsi love story, Nazamu Ganjavi's 12th-century poem, “Khosraw and Shirin”, which is a tragic tale of love between a Sassanian king and an Armenian princess. Abbas Kiarostami was among the principal reasons I personally developed an interest in Iranian cinema, finding out about Iranian society and visiting Tehran more than once. No doubt Kiarostami goes beyond being an Iranian filmmaker as such. He is a universal philosopher with a worldwide following. His death is a loss to world culture, not just Iranian cinema, though his works will continue to enjoy a special place in the hearts of millions, and a salutary, inspiring example of how to transcend both geopolitical and censorial constraints to tell your story.
