Abbas Kiarostami: A Retrospective

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.

Fri, Sep 27

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 …

Sat, Sep 28

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 …

Sat, Sep 28

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 …

Sat, Oct 5

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 …

Sun, Oct 6

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- …