September 20, 2019 – October 28, 2019
Global film culture lost one of its most poetic voices with the passing of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami in late 2016. Born in 1940, Kiarostami immersed himself in the plastic arts early in life, but upon the 1969 establishment of Kanoon, an Iranian state cinema agency focused on the development of children, he became deeply involved in filmmaking at a friend’s urging. Immediately establishing a hybrid fact/fiction style free from the confines of commercial cinema, Kiarostami started by making children’s films, applying his deft philosophical touch to simple issues, made profound via the camera’s lens, the microphone, and the editing bench. Showing his ability to work effectively inside a repressive regime, Kiarostami subsequently made a long string of poetic masterpieces, beginning with his Koker Trilogy (1987-94) and including Close-up (1990), the Palme d’Or-winning Taste of Cherry (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and many others, up to his late work overseas, Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012). Long a massive influence on not only generations of Iranian filmmakers, including Jafar Panahi and Asghar Farhadi, Kiarostami has influenced myriad global artists with an interest in blending documentary and fiction to excavate deeper truths about being human. Always beautifully shot, ethical and humanist in equal measure, Kiarostami’s films appear together for the first time with this career-spanning retrospective, featuring new restorations and rare screenings of long-unavailable works.
“When we reveal a film’s world to the members of an audience, they each learn to create their own world through the wealth of their own experience. As a filmmaker, I rely on this creative intervention for, otherwise, the film and the audience will die together. Faultless stories that work perfectly have one major defect: they work too well to allow the audience to intervene. I believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and time to its audience. A half-created cinema, an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience, so resulting in hundreds of films. It belongs to the members of that audience and corresponds to their own world.”—Abbas Kiarostami, “An Unfinished Cinema,” 1995.
24 Frames
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Three years in the making and Kiarostami’s final film before his death in 2016, each segment in 24 Frames offers …
A Wedding Suit
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
In a trilevel shopping arcade, a teenage boy who works for a tailor is besieged by two other boys who …
ABC Africa
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
In 2000, Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in …
And Life Goes On
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that left fifty thousand dead, Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his …
Case No. 1, Case No. 2
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
This extraordinary film was made in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow. Kiarostami stages two versions …
Certified Copy
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
A late career masterpiece that returned Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami to the world stage, Certified Copy is a shapeshifting film …
Close-Up
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
The recent death of Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), one of our greatest filmmakers, was, and will continue to be, a huge …
Five Dedicated to Ozu
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
A piece of driftwood on the seashore, carried about by the waves. People walking on the seashore. The oldest ones …
Homework
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
In Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, interviewing a succession of invariably cute first- …
Like Someone in Love
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Kiarostami’s final narrative feature before his death in 2016 is the beguiling Like Someone in Love, a strange sort of …
Shirin
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
One of Kiarostami’s most daring formal experiments turns the camera on the audience. Set entirely in a movie theater showing …
Taste of Cherry
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and celebrated as the critical rival of his own …
Ten
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
As she roams the streets of Tehran in her car, a recently divorced woman (Mania Akbari) chauffeurs a rotating cast …
The Report
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
The rare early Kiarostami film made outside of Kanoon, and one of the most downbeat of his features, this adult …
The Traveler
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Kiarostami’s first feature focuses on a boy in a provincial city so avid to get to Tehran to see a …
The Wind Will Carry Us
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
A TV crew from Tehran arrives in a remote Kurdish village to film an unusual funeral ceremony but are stymied …
Through the Olive Trees
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Kiarostami takes metanarrative gamesmanship to masterful new heights in the final installment of The Koker Trilogy. Unfolding “behind the scenes” …
Where is the Friend’s House?
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
The first film in Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing Koker Trilogy takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his …