by Joyless Creatures Staff
On July 4, world cinema lost one of its greatest modern practitioners - Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who made more than forty films since he began working in the 1970s (as a member of the influential Iranian New Wave). Initially a painter and graphic designer, Kiarostami shifted to film when he helped open a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development for Children in Tehran - hardly a coincidence, given the large number of child characters in his work (especially his earlier films).
Kiarostami has a reputation for being hard to interpret and classify; his films embrace not just the ambiguity of arthouse cinema, but the very malleability of identity and truth. Like many directors in the Iranian New Wave, he addressed social issues and utilized some tenets of realist filmmaking (non-professional actors, on-location shooting, diegetic sound and "simple" narratives), but also developed a complex aesthetic that was often self-reflexive and cryptic, inviting the audience to come to their own conclusions about the characters and their motivations. He frequently blurred documentary and fictional elements, implicitly raising questions about the nature of life and art in the process.
The following appraisals of Kiarostami's work do not provide a comprehensive analysis, but a sampling of the director's finest and most idiosyncratic films. With a vast filmography of shorts, features, and documentaries and a plethora of commemorative tributes written about Kiarostami recently, Joyless Creatures urges you to explore the career of one of the greatest filmmakers of the last half-century.
The following appraisals of Kiarostami's work do not provide a comprehensive analysis, but a sampling of the director's finest and most idiosyncratic films. With a vast filmography of shorts, features, and documentaries and a plethora of commemorative tributes written about Kiarostami recently, Joyless Creatures urges you to explore the career of one of the greatest filmmakers of the last half-century.
The Traveler (1974)
Abbas Kiarostami draws heavily on Italian Neorealism in his second feature, The Traveler (1974). The plot follows a young boy in rural Iran through a school day's misadventures. Kiarostami is great at giving young actors the space to act out, and Hassan Darabi’s Qassem has more than a little of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel to him. It’s never easy being twelve years old, but it’s a sheer pleasure to watch these kids subvert grouching traditions toward furtive pleasures and fuel their adolescent obsession with soccer.
It’s great to watch this film in the context of Kiarostami’s later work, especially his Koker Trilogy, which features a filmmaker in the process of directing a “naturalist” film. (Set in and around the northern Iranian village of Koker, this trilogy includes Where Is the Friend's Home?, Through the Olive Trees, and Life, and Nothing More.) In the process, we see the way Kiarostami stages scenes like a boy eating his lunch on a back stair, or the effusive spontaneity of a game of street soccer. Moving across the breadth of Kiarostami’s canon, a commentary on realism and naturalism inevitably emerges, as each film describes a different kind of reality and fiction. - Joseph Houlihan
Abbas Kiarostami draws heavily on Italian Neorealism in his second feature, The Traveler (1974). The plot follows a young boy in rural Iran through a school day's misadventures. Kiarostami is great at giving young actors the space to act out, and Hassan Darabi’s Qassem has more than a little of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel to him. It’s never easy being twelve years old, but it’s a sheer pleasure to watch these kids subvert grouching traditions toward furtive pleasures and fuel their adolescent obsession with soccer.
It’s great to watch this film in the context of Kiarostami’s later work, especially his Koker Trilogy, which features a filmmaker in the process of directing a “naturalist” film. (Set in and around the northern Iranian village of Koker, this trilogy includes Where Is the Friend's Home?, Through the Olive Trees, and Life, and Nothing More.) In the process, we see the way Kiarostami stages scenes like a boy eating his lunch on a back stair, or the effusive spontaneity of a game of street soccer. Moving across the breadth of Kiarostami’s canon, a commentary on realism and naturalism inevitably emerges, as each film describes a different kind of reality and fiction. - Joseph Houlihan
Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987)
1987’s Where is the Friend’s Home?, arriving 10 years after Abbas Kiarostami’s feature-length debut,
was the Iranian iconoclast’s first film to gain international recognition, receiving considerable festival
attention and critical adoration and ultimately positioning Kiarostami for his many successes in the
1990s and beyond. Still one of Kiarostami’s most renowned works, the film is an impressive tightrope-
walk between minimalist parable and near-verite rawness. Its subtlety and its simplehearted, unforced
emotional potency keep it resonant today.
Where is the Friend’s Home? follows Ahmed, a young boy who returns home from school one day to
discover that he’s accidentally taken home not just his own homework notebook, but also that of a
classmate named Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh, who is already on thin ice with the teacher for losing
his notebook and turning in his homework on loose pages. Ahmed feels moved to do the right thing and return the notebook, helping Nematzadeh avoid further punishment (and possibly even
expulsion), but his plan to walk to Nematzadeh’s village to carry out the deed is thwarted by his
mother, who sees no reason for him to do such a thing. When he does finally sneak away, however,
Ahmed finds himself lost and confused, and passersby – both adults and children – are scarcely any
help. Encountering dead ends and contradictions as his quest drags into nighttime, Ahmed begins to
lose hope that he’ll ever track down Nematzadeh.
This spare narrative thread is perfect for Kiarostami’s stripped-down narrative style. Like much of the director's work, the film lingers on the everyday lives and experiences of Iran’s poor communities,
meditating on their relationships to work, family, history, and generational difference. At times,
Ahmed’s story is left by the wayside for brief interludes of conversation between other characters, addressing both quotidian concerns and grander ideas, only to then find the young protagonist's
fraught journey circling back into the narrative frame. The film shares with the key works of post-
WWII Italian neorealism a fascination with poverty, struggle, and destitution, but there’s an easy
warmth undergirding Kiarostami’s vision.
This backdrop of optimism remains intact even when the film is viewed as a fable or allegory, with
Ahmed’s conundrum as a stand-in for the difficulties innate to any attempt at negotiating and
manifesting morality in the public sphere. Ahmed’s solution to his conundrum ultimately involves a
lie, complicating this thematic structure, but this sense of contradiction is part and parcel with the
film’s atmosphere – Where is the Friend’s Home? is imbued with the innocence, wonder, and confusion
of its young protagonist and with the world-weariness of the older characters who block his path or
lead him astray. - Peter Vallely
1987’s Where is the Friend’s Home?, arriving 10 years after Abbas Kiarostami’s feature-length debut,
was the Iranian iconoclast’s first film to gain international recognition, receiving considerable festival
attention and critical adoration and ultimately positioning Kiarostami for his many successes in the
1990s and beyond. Still one of Kiarostami’s most renowned works, the film is an impressive tightrope-
walk between minimalist parable and near-verite rawness. Its subtlety and its simplehearted, unforced
emotional potency keep it resonant today.
Where is the Friend’s Home? follows Ahmed, a young boy who returns home from school one day to
discover that he’s accidentally taken home not just his own homework notebook, but also that of a
classmate named Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh, who is already on thin ice with the teacher for losing
his notebook and turning in his homework on loose pages. Ahmed feels moved to do the right thing and return the notebook, helping Nematzadeh avoid further punishment (and possibly even
expulsion), but his plan to walk to Nematzadeh’s village to carry out the deed is thwarted by his
mother, who sees no reason for him to do such a thing. When he does finally sneak away, however,
Ahmed finds himself lost and confused, and passersby – both adults and children – are scarcely any
help. Encountering dead ends and contradictions as his quest drags into nighttime, Ahmed begins to
lose hope that he’ll ever track down Nematzadeh.
This spare narrative thread is perfect for Kiarostami’s stripped-down narrative style. Like much of the director's work, the film lingers on the everyday lives and experiences of Iran’s poor communities,
meditating on their relationships to work, family, history, and generational difference. At times,
Ahmed’s story is left by the wayside for brief interludes of conversation between other characters, addressing both quotidian concerns and grander ideas, only to then find the young protagonist's
fraught journey circling back into the narrative frame. The film shares with the key works of post-
WWII Italian neorealism a fascination with poverty, struggle, and destitution, but there’s an easy
warmth undergirding Kiarostami’s vision.
This backdrop of optimism remains intact even when the film is viewed as a fable or allegory, with
Ahmed’s conundrum as a stand-in for the difficulties innate to any attempt at negotiating and
manifesting morality in the public sphere. Ahmed’s solution to his conundrum ultimately involves a
lie, complicating this thematic structure, but this sense of contradiction is part and parcel with the
film’s atmosphere – Where is the Friend’s Home? is imbued with the innocence, wonder, and confusion
of its young protagonist and with the world-weariness of the older characters who block his path or
lead him astray. - Peter Vallely
Through the Olive Trees (1994)
In the third installment of Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy (also including Where is the Friend's Home? and Life, and Nothing More, all three shot in the northern Iranian village of Koker), Through the Olive Trees, a film inside a film, revolves around a marriage plot following an earthquake in rural northern Iran. A young man, a former construction worker, courts a student orphaned by the earthquake. A film director moves actors and nonactors through a day in a rural village.
This is pure Kiarostami, a poet of earth tones and earthmovers. The olive groves are lush and envelop the fictions and meta-fictions. He excels in small moments: a tea break, a bus ride along a rural road, the sound of wind through the trees, again and again everyone talking at once, steam and cooking smoke, tombs, the smiles of schoolchildren and their mother’s tears. He finds wit and humor in simplicity, and sweetness in sadness.
Kiarostami achieves naturalism through scripted yet nonchalant long-takes. He lets bodies move through expanding fields, establishing a generous and expansive vision of the world. - Joseph Houlihan
In the third installment of Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy (also including Where is the Friend's Home? and Life, and Nothing More, all three shot in the northern Iranian village of Koker), Through the Olive Trees, a film inside a film, revolves around a marriage plot following an earthquake in rural northern Iran. A young man, a former construction worker, courts a student orphaned by the earthquake. A film director moves actors and nonactors through a day in a rural village.
This is pure Kiarostami, a poet of earth tones and earthmovers. The olive groves are lush and envelop the fictions and meta-fictions. He excels in small moments: a tea break, a bus ride along a rural road, the sound of wind through the trees, again and again everyone talking at once, steam and cooking smoke, tombs, the smiles of schoolchildren and their mother’s tears. He finds wit and humor in simplicity, and sweetness in sadness.
Kiarostami achieves naturalism through scripted yet nonchalant long-takes. He lets bodies move through expanding fields, establishing a generous and expansive vision of the world. - Joseph Houlihan
Taste of Cherry (1997)
Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 masterpiece boldly takes nothing less than the meaning of life as its
subject matter, but tackles this weighty theme in the most minimal and unassuming manner
imaginable. The film follows a man (Homayoun Ershadi) as he drives across Tehran in search of
someone to help him commit suicide in exchange for a substantial sum of money. As the protagonist tries to convince various people (a Kurd solider, an Afghan religious student, a Turkish professor) to help bury him, the film proceeds through a series of conversations that ask all kinds of interesting questions about not only why this man would want to die, but why anyone would want to live. The individual discussions never feel heavy, and often have a low-key comic vibe, but they have a powerful cumulative effect.
As always, Kiarostami is less interested in shoving a message down his audience’s throat than in
asking big questions with an open heart and genuine curiosity. The director’s unwillingness to
force a pat resolution to life’s mysteries is reflected in his characteristically seamless blend of
documentary and fiction. Most of the film’s conversations were filmed with the offscreen
Kiarostami provoking his non-professional cast with questions and then intercutting their off-the-
cuff responses with scripted dialogue from his main character, creating virtual exchanges that are
simultaneously honest, surprising and entertaining.
There are also moments of casual visual beauty. A sequence where the main character comes
across a construction site and sees his shadow in the sand being buried is a powerful reflection
on mortality, and perhaps the single most poetic moment in Kiarostami’s filmography. Homayun
Payvar’s cinematography rarely calls attention to itself elsewhere in the film, but Iran has rarely
looked more diverse onscreen than it does here, both in terms of its people and its terrain. In the end Kiarostami pointedly avoids telling us what ultimately happens to his protagonist, and he allows us to draw our own conclusions about whether this man truly has a reason to go on living. The controversial fourth-wall breaking finale, in which the film abruptly shifts to documentary footage of the making of the film, seems to be Kiarostami’s wordless explanation for what gave his own life meaning. - Frank Olson
Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 masterpiece boldly takes nothing less than the meaning of life as its
subject matter, but tackles this weighty theme in the most minimal and unassuming manner
imaginable. The film follows a man (Homayoun Ershadi) as he drives across Tehran in search of
someone to help him commit suicide in exchange for a substantial sum of money. As the protagonist tries to convince various people (a Kurd solider, an Afghan religious student, a Turkish professor) to help bury him, the film proceeds through a series of conversations that ask all kinds of interesting questions about not only why this man would want to die, but why anyone would want to live. The individual discussions never feel heavy, and often have a low-key comic vibe, but they have a powerful cumulative effect.
As always, Kiarostami is less interested in shoving a message down his audience’s throat than in
asking big questions with an open heart and genuine curiosity. The director’s unwillingness to
force a pat resolution to life’s mysteries is reflected in his characteristically seamless blend of
documentary and fiction. Most of the film’s conversations were filmed with the offscreen
Kiarostami provoking his non-professional cast with questions and then intercutting their off-the-
cuff responses with scripted dialogue from his main character, creating virtual exchanges that are
simultaneously honest, surprising and entertaining.
There are also moments of casual visual beauty. A sequence where the main character comes
across a construction site and sees his shadow in the sand being buried is a powerful reflection
on mortality, and perhaps the single most poetic moment in Kiarostami’s filmography. Homayun
Payvar’s cinematography rarely calls attention to itself elsewhere in the film, but Iran has rarely
looked more diverse onscreen than it does here, both in terms of its people and its terrain. In the end Kiarostami pointedly avoids telling us what ultimately happens to his protagonist, and he allows us to draw our own conclusions about whether this man truly has a reason to go on living. The controversial fourth-wall breaking finale, in which the film abruptly shifts to documentary footage of the making of the film, seems to be Kiarostami’s wordless explanation for what gave his own life meaning. - Frank Olson
Certified Copy (2010)
Forty years after his filmmaking career began, Abbas Kiarostami made his first dramatic feature outside of Iran: Certified Copy, set and shot in beautiful Tuscany, starring the French actress Juliette Binoche and British actor (and opera performer) William Shimell, and spoken in French, Italian, and English. On the surface, it might sound like any number of ruminative European films in which characters amble around picturesque locales discussing life, art, beauty, and loneliness. But one of the most remarkable things about Certified Copy is its utter Kiarostami-ness, its disarming mix of simplicity and complexity and its existence in an indiscriminate zone between truth and artifice.
In the town of Arezzo, a single mother and antiques dealer (Binoche) attends a lecture by philosopher/writer James Miller (Shimell), who from the start seems charming but also smugly sure of his own brilliance. His latest book, Certified Copy, discusses the nature of the original and the copy in art, suggesting that manufactured duplicates may in fact surpass the "original" in the emotional and symbolic value they offer. A day later the two characters meet again, and she suggests they spend the day in the idyllic village of Lucagnino, famed for the many weddings held there (the ancient architecture and spiritual air are said to be good luck for newlyweds). At first the man and woman's dialogue seems both flirtatious and combative, a believable blend of confidence and vulnerability, but about halfway through the movie a strange thing happens: a character assumes they're a long-married couple and neither of them correct her. For the rest of Certified Copy, these two strangers act as though they've been married for 15 years, bickering and (maybe) reconciling as though they've played this role countless times before.
Many filmmakers and critics seem to assume that cerebral themes and emotional sincerity can't go hand-in-hand, but this is the duality that Kiarostami embraced in many of his films: the elusive, mercurial nature of the characters and their actions deepen their humanity, bringing them alive in poignant ways. Certified Copy might be described as an exploration of how the original and the copy, truth and artifice, art and audience, the self and the outside world interact - in ways too complex and far-reaching to elucidate here - but it's also about simply being alive, the thrills and pains of love and the innumerable mysteries of human nature. Certified Copy is one of my favorite films because it seems endless - not in its running time (it's actually very brief) but in its infinite riddles and ideas, which reveal new insights and beauties no matter how many times you return to the film. - Matt Levine
Forty years after his filmmaking career began, Abbas Kiarostami made his first dramatic feature outside of Iran: Certified Copy, set and shot in beautiful Tuscany, starring the French actress Juliette Binoche and British actor (and opera performer) William Shimell, and spoken in French, Italian, and English. On the surface, it might sound like any number of ruminative European films in which characters amble around picturesque locales discussing life, art, beauty, and loneliness. But one of the most remarkable things about Certified Copy is its utter Kiarostami-ness, its disarming mix of simplicity and complexity and its existence in an indiscriminate zone between truth and artifice.
In the town of Arezzo, a single mother and antiques dealer (Binoche) attends a lecture by philosopher/writer James Miller (Shimell), who from the start seems charming but also smugly sure of his own brilliance. His latest book, Certified Copy, discusses the nature of the original and the copy in art, suggesting that manufactured duplicates may in fact surpass the "original" in the emotional and symbolic value they offer. A day later the two characters meet again, and she suggests they spend the day in the idyllic village of Lucagnino, famed for the many weddings held there (the ancient architecture and spiritual air are said to be good luck for newlyweds). At first the man and woman's dialogue seems both flirtatious and combative, a believable blend of confidence and vulnerability, but about halfway through the movie a strange thing happens: a character assumes they're a long-married couple and neither of them correct her. For the rest of Certified Copy, these two strangers act as though they've been married for 15 years, bickering and (maybe) reconciling as though they've played this role countless times before.
Many filmmakers and critics seem to assume that cerebral themes and emotional sincerity can't go hand-in-hand, but this is the duality that Kiarostami embraced in many of his films: the elusive, mercurial nature of the characters and their actions deepen their humanity, bringing them alive in poignant ways. Certified Copy might be described as an exploration of how the original and the copy, truth and artifice, art and audience, the self and the outside world interact - in ways too complex and far-reaching to elucidate here - but it's also about simply being alive, the thrills and pains of love and the innumerable mysteries of human nature. Certified Copy is one of my favorite films because it seems endless - not in its running time (it's actually very brief) but in its infinite riddles and ideas, which reveal new insights and beauties no matter how many times you return to the film. - Matt Levine
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