64 Facts About Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer.

An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of over forty films, including shorts and documentaries.

Abbas Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy, Close-Up, The Wind Will Carry Us, and Taste of Cherry, which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year.

Abbas Kiarostami had worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director, and producer and had designed credit titles and publicity material.

Abbas Kiarostami was a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer.

Abbas Kiarostami was part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and emphasized the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues.

Abbas Kiarostami had a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary-style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras.

Abbas Kiarostami is known for his use of Persian poetry in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films.

Abbas Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often a mix of fictional and documentary elements.

Abbas Kiarostami majored in painting and graphic design and supported his studies by working as a traffic policeman.

In 1970 when the Iranian New Wave began with Dariush Mehrjui's film Gav, Abbas Kiarostami helped set up a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran.

In 1975, Abbas Kiarostami directed two short films So Can I and Two Solutions for One Problem.

Abbas Kiarostami made the film from a child's point of view.

Abbas Kiarostami uses the themes of life, death, change, and continuity to connect the films.

But, Abbas Kiarostami did not consider the three films to comprise a trilogy.

Abbas Kiarostami suggested that the last two titles plus Taste of Cherry comprise a trilogy, given their common theme of the preciousness of life.

In 1987, Abbas Kiarostami was involved in the screenwriting of The Key, which he edited but did not direct.

That year Abbas Kiarostami won a Prix Roberto Rossellini, the first professional film award of his career, for his direction of the film.

Abbas Kiarostami next wrote the screenplays for The Journey and The White Balloon, for his former assistant Jafar Panahi.

Abbas Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival for Taste of Cherry.

Abbas Kiarostami directed The Wind Will Carry Us in 1999, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival.

In 2000, at the San Francisco Film Festival award ceremony, Abbas Kiarostami was awarded the Akira Kurosawa Prize for lifetime achievement in directing, but surprised everyone by giving it away to veteran Iranian actor Behrooz Vossoughi for his contribution to Iranian cinema.

Abbas Kiarostami stayed for ten days and made ABC Africa.

The trip was originally intended as research in preparation for the filming, but Abbas Kiarostami ended up editing the entire film from the video footage shot there.

Abbas Kiarostami's journey is composed of ten conversations with various passengers, which include her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute, and a jilted bride and her demanding young son.

In 2003, Abbas Kiarostami directed Five, a poetic feature with no dialogue or characterization.

In 2005, Abbas Kiarostami contributed the central section to Tickets, a portmanteau film set on a train traveling through Italy.

In 2008, Abbas Kiarostami directed the feature Shirin, which features close-ups of many notable Iranian actresses and the French actress Juliette Binoche as they watch a film based on a partly mythological Persian romance tale of Khosrow and Shirin, with themes of female self-sacrifice.

Abbas Kiarostami was a jury member at numerous film festivals, most notably the Cannes Film Festival in 1993,2002 and 2005.

Abbas Kiarostami was the president of the Camera d'Or Jury in Cannes Film Festival 2005.

Abbas Kiarostami was announced as the president of the Cinefondation and short film sections of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

Abbas Kiarostami made regular appearances at many other film festivals across Europe, including the Estoril Film Festival in Portugal.

That one shot took around forty days to complete until Abbas Kiarostami was fully content with the scene.

Abbas Kiarostami later commented that the breaking of scenes would have disrupted the rhythm and content of the film's structure, preferring to let the scene flow as one.

Unlike other directors, Abbas Kiarostami showed no interest in staging extravagant combat scenes or complicated chase scenes in large-scale productions, instead of attempting to mold the medium of film to his own specifications.

Abbas Kiarostami appeared to have settled on his style with the Koker trilogy, which included a myriad of references to his own film material, connecting common themes and subject matter between each of the films.

Stephen Bransford has contended that Abbas Kiarostami's films do not contain references to the work of other directors, but are fashioned in such a manner that they are self-referenced.

Abbas Kiarostami continued experimenting with new modes of filming, using different directorial methods and techniques.

Abbas Kiarostami gave suggestions to the actors about what to do, and a camera placed on the dashboard filmed them while they drove around Tehran.

Abbas Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often a mix of fictional and documentary elements.

In other words, wanting to accomplish more than just represent life and death as opposing forces, but rather to illustrate the way in which each element of nature is inextricably linked, Abbas Kiarostami devised a cinema that does more than just present the viewer with the documentable "facts," but neither is it simply a matter of artifice.

Sima Daad of the University of Washington contends that Abbas Kiarostami's adaptation arrives at the theoretical realm of adaptation by expanding its limit from inter-textual potential to trans-generic potential.

Abbas Kiarostami, along with Jean Cocteau, Satyajit Ray, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Derek Jarman and Alejandro Jodorowsky, was a filmmaker who expressed himself in other genres, such as poetry, set designs, painting, or photography.

Abbas Kiarostami produced Mozart's opera Cosi fan tutte, which premiered in Aix-en-Provence in 2003 before being performed at the English National Opera in London in 2004.

Abbas Kiarostami's poetry is reminiscent of the later nature poems of the Persian painter-poet Sohrab Sepehri.

Abbas Kiarostami was one of the few directors who remained in Iran after the 1979 revolution, when many of his peers fled the country.

Abbas Kiarostami believes that it was one of the most important decisions of his career.

Abbas Kiarostami frequently wore dark spectacles or sunglasses, which he required because of a sensitivity to light.

In March 2016, Abbas Kiarostami was hospitalized due to intestinal bleeding and reportedly went into a coma after undergoing two operations.

Sources, including a Ministry of Health and Medical Education spokesman, reported that Abbas Kiarostami was suffering from gastrointestinal cancer.

The week before his death, Abbas Kiarostami had been invited to join the Academy Awards in Hollywood as part of efforts to increase the diversity of its Oscar judges.

Abbas Kiarostami's body was returned to Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on 8 July 2016, while a crowd of Iranian film directors, actors, actresses and other artists were in Tehran airport to pay their respects.

Dariush Mehrjui, another famous Iranian cinema director, criticized the medical team that treated Abbas Kiarostami and demanded legal action.

Abbas Kiarostami changed the world's cinema; he freshened it and humanized it in contrast with Hollywood's rough version.

The New York Times wrote: "Abbas Kiarostami, Acclaimed Iranian Filmmaker, Dies at 76" and Peter Bradshaw paid tribute to Kiarostami: "a sophisticated, self-possessed master of cinematic poetry".

Attendees held banners with the titles of his movies and pictures of his most famous posters, as they praised the support Abbas Kiarostami contributed to culture, and particularly to filmmaking in Iran.

Abbas Kiarostami was later buried in a private ceremony in the northern Tehran town of Lavasan.

In 2022, Akbari accused Abbas Kiarostami of raping her twice, in Tehran when she was 25 and he was about 60, and in London after Ten had premiered.

Abbas Kiarostami has received worldwide acclaim for his work from both audiences and critics, and, in 1999, he was voted the most important Iranian film director of the 1990s by two international critics' polls.

Abbas Kiarostami has gained recognition from film theorists, critics, as well as peers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Nanni Moretti, Chris Marker, and Ray Carney.

Abbas Kiarostami had been invited by the New York Film Festival, as well as Ohio University and Harvard University.

We are very lucky to have the chance to see a master like Abbas Kiarostami thinking on his feet.

Abbas Kiarostami was a member of the advisory board of World Cinema Foundation.

Abbas Kiarostami has won the admiration of audiences and critics worldwide and received at least seventy awards up to the year 2000.