Director was one of ‘world’s great visionaries’
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, whose 1997 film Taste of Cherry won the prestigious Palme d’Or and who kept working despite government resistance, died Monday. He was 76.
He died in Paris, where he had gone for cancer treatment last week after undergoing surgery in Iran earlier this year.
Iran’s president and foreign minister praised the director on Tuesday, with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif calling his death a loss for international cinema.
Kiarostami wrote and directed dozens of films over a career spanning more than four decades.
Taste of Cherry, which told the story of an Iranian man looking for someone to bury him after he killed himself, won the top award at the Cannes Film Festival. Kiarostami also wrote and directed Certified Copy, a 2010 film starring Juliette Binoche.
He was also an artist. His exhibition of life-size photos of ancient doors from Tehran appeared at Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum last winter. The museum and the Toronto International Film Festival collaborated on a retrospective of Kiarostami’s films.
Henry Kim, director of the Aga Khan, called Kiarostami “one of the world’s great visionaries, who influenced generations of artists in Iran and around the world.”
“Kiarostami touched us all through his poetry, his love, his astute observations of the human condition, his generosity and his gentle nature. It was a privilege and a pleasure to work with Kiarostami in 2015. . . . The Aga Khan Museum honours his life and his work.”
Among his other films is Close-Up from 1990, which told the true story of a man who impersonated a filmmaker and tricked a family into believing that he would put them in a film. His 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s Home? is a story of honour, about a boy who tries to return schoolwork to a friend.
Filmmaker Martin Scorsese said some people referred to Kiarostami’s pictures as minimalist, but he thought it was the opposite. Every scene in Taste of Cherry and Where Is the Friend’s Home? is overflowing with beauty and surprise, he said.
“I got to know Abbas over the last10 or 15 years,” he said. “He was a very special human being: quiet, elegant, modest, articulate and quite observant. I don’t think he missed anything.”
In 2000, two international critics’ polls picked him as the best filmmaker of the 1990s.
In Certified Copy, Binoche plays a French woman who goes on what appears to be a first date with a British writer. Tensions quickly erupt between the two and eventually viewers start to suspect that these two may actually know each other; and perhaps had once been married.
For that film and others, Kiarostami had to work outside Iran because of the difficulties in making movies there.
“For a long time, the Iranian government has put a spoke in the wheel of independent filmmakers,” he said at a 2010 news conference.