Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami; 22 June 1940 – 4 July 2016) was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer. An active film-maker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy, Close-Up, Taste of Cherry– which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year – and The Wind Will Carry Us. In his later works, Certified Copyand Like Someone in Love, he...
NationalityIranian
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth22 June 1940
The calling of art is to extract us from our daily reality, to bring us to a hidden truth that's difficult to access - to a level that's not material but spiritual.
Whenever people ask me what the story is for my next film, I won't tell and people feel it's because I'm being secretive or something, but it's actually because I'm ashamed to sum up a film in three sentences.
There are at least two retrospectives of my work each year in some country.
I think life is so difficult to catch, it's so furtive, that a copy, a film, can in no way catch it and represent it.
I was mentioning with the digital camera, maybe this new fashion of filmmaking gives a closer look of what life may be like. But it's still nothing but a copy.
I don't like reverse-angle shots - I find them very fake and very untruthful to the viewer.
This [the earthquake] was a very big influence on me, and the issue of life and death from then on does recur in my films.
My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated.
People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people's minds to lazy minds.
Having an international voice is not really about whether we speak Persian or any other language.
Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.
My last experience of film-making was Tickets, a three-episode film in Italy, the third of which is directed by myself. It's not for me to judge whether it's a good film or a bad film, but what I could say is that nobody had a cultural or linguistic issue with what was produced.
A digital camera does have many advantages and I was a believer that digital video would be a big influence on film-making.
It is a very important film, Life And Nothing More, in that what was filmed was inspired by a journey I had made just three days after an earthquake. And I speak not only of the film itself but also of the experience of being in that place, where only three days before 50,000 people had died.