Abbas Kiarostami

The Gene Siskel Film Center presents the retrospective Abbas Kiarostami, a series that encompasses a total of thirty-two films, the largest selection of the work of this major Iranian director yet available in North America.

Most titles are presented in new digital restorations, thanks to the Criterion Collection and mk2. Included are twenty-two full-length and short features, and ten shorts. Early short features including Experience, Fellow Citizen, and First Graders are exceedingly rare, while a number of the shorts were only recently rediscovered and restored.

In a filmmaking career that extended from The Bread and Alley, his first short in 1970, to 24 frames, his final feature, completed and released following his untimely 2016 death, Kiarostami’s career blazed with the creativity of a true innovator. Born in Tehran in 1940, and exhibiting an early interest in the arts, he earned a degree in painting at Tehran University. Throughout his life, he was to apply his wide-ranging talents to poetry, photography, installation art, and design, all of which fed into his career in cinema.

Using the most minimal of narrative methods and many non-professional actors, Kiarostami frequently lays bare the artifice behind the fiction, creating films within films in complex and layered stories that grapple with issues at the very heart of human existence. His protagonists are often motivated by quests, as in Where's the Friend's House?, or engaged in journeys, as in And Life Goes On, with the journey itself becoming the end goal. Kiarostami’s own quest was for an emotional and societal truth that could not be attained through realism alone. Is he a realist or a master illusionist? His modus operandi is to tease a greater and more accurate reality from the facts through fiction.

The Palme d’Or that Kiarostami was awarded for A Taste of Cherry at Cannes in 1997 confirmed what scores of critics had already discerned: that this was a master of his medium working at the height of his powers. As he moved increasingly in an international sphere, gaining a wide international audience, Kiarostami nurtured the Persian roots of his work while delving ever deeper into experimentation with self-reflexive narrative, illusion, and cinematic sleight of hand, never losing his compassionate eye on the vagaries of life.

Women gained a new ascendency in his work, as did themes of emotional resonance, in films including Ten, Certified Copy, and Like Someone in Love. In these films, relationships are most often based on illusion, and communications between men and women are governed by slippery trade-offs, compromises, and half-truths. By contrast, Shirin is a stirring portrait of womankind through the faces of 113 actresses.

In his later work, Kiarostami’s methods evolved with changing technology, and he brought an artist’s boundless curiosity to the transition to digital filmmaking. In digital technology, he found the perfect tools for altering images to his idealized vision, in films including Five (for Ozu) and 24 Frames. Manipulating, altering, and creating seamless composite imagery, he found the means to arrive at truth through illusion.