User:Draft-Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami (born June 22 1940) is one of the most influential and controversial Iranian filmmakers and one of the most highly celebrated directors in the international film community of the last few decades.

Considered by some as one of the "true masters of contemporary cinema", Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has won not only the admiration of audiences and critics worldwide, but also the support of directors and film theorists as distinguished as Jean-Luc Godard, Nanni Moretti (who made a short film about opening one of Kiarostami’s films in his theater in Rome), Chris Marker, Ray Carney, and Akira Kurosawa, who said of Kiarostami's films: "Words cannot describe my feelings about them and I simply advise you to see his films... When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami’s films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place." In 1999 he was unequivocally voted the most important film director of the 1990s by two international critics polls. In March 2000, Phillip Lopate wrote: "We don’t know it yet, but we are living in the age of Kiarostami."

Life and early career
Born in Tehran, Kiarostami was interested in the arts from an early age. He won a painting competition at the age of eighteen, and left home to study at Tehran University. Kiarostami studied at the Tehran University's Faculty of Fine Arts whilst paying for his studies by working as a traffic policeman. He majored in painting and graphic design. As a painter, designer, and illustrator, Kiarostami worked throughout the 1960s in advertising, making commercials, designing posters, creating credit titles for films (including Gheysar by Masoud Kimiai), and illustrating children’s books.

Film career
In 1969 – the year that saw the birth of the Iranian New Wave with Dariush Mehrjui's seminal film The COW – Kiarostami helped to set up a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (known as Kanun). The department's debut production was Kiarostami's own first film, the twelve-minute The Bread and Alley, neo-realist short about a small boy's perilous walk home from school. The department would go on to become one of Iran’s most famous film studios, producing not only Kiarostami’s films, but also such modern Persian classics as The Runner and Bashu, the Little Stranger. In the 1970s, Abbas Kiarostami rode the wave of artistic renaissance in Iran.

Kiarostami has had a unique style of film making since his first film. He said: "Bread and alley was my first experience in cinema and I must say a very difficult one. I had to work with a very young child, a dog and an unprofessional crew, except for the cinematographer, who was nagging and complaining all the time. Well, the cinematographer in a sense was right because I did not follow the conventions of filmmaking that he had become accustomed to".

Following his first long film, The Experience (1973), he attracted a degree of international attention with The Traveller (1974), the story of a young lad's trip to Teheran for a football match that established Kiarostami's reputation for realism, diegetic simplicity and stylistic complexity, as well as a fascination with physical and spiritual journeys that would recur throughout his career. However, it was the "Earthquake" or "Koker" trilogy of Where Is the Friend's House? (1988), And Life Goes On... (1992), and Through the Olive Trees (1994) that confirmed Kiarostami as a worldwide arthouse favourite. But what was also becoming apparent was his genius for blurring the line between life and art.

Close-up (1990) and later Life, and Nothing More... (1992) led to Kiarostami's discovery in the West, mainly by the French. Kiarostami's Close Up films the real trial of a simple, poor man in Iran who pretended to be the film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and who duped a family into believing they would be in his new film. The family suspects theft as the motive for this complex charade, but through the trial, it emerges that the pretence was only protagonist Hossein Sabzian's escape into a world of art and cinema, a world he could exert control over and command respect in through invoking Makhmalbaf's name. Close Up is a film-on-film commentary. At its simplest, Kiarostami's masterpiece tackles Sabzian's moral justification for taking on Makhmalbaf's identity (for him, it arose from his love of the arts). Close Up's genius, though, is not that it suggests that there's no legal and/or moral justification for Sabzian's actions but that Sabzian's defense is impossible to fathom unless the spectator can share the man's passion for art as cultural and intellectual emancipator. In effect, Close-Up can be considered a documentary, as the trial and the meeting with Mohsen Makhmalbaf are absolutely real. The rest of the film, though based on real events, is staged. This is the kind of movie that does not fit into categories. But that's exactly what makes Close-Up such a groundbreaking movie. Close-Up has become a favourite among filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nanni Moretti. Refering to Close-up, Werner Herzog said: "[Close-up is] the greatest documentary on filmmaking I have ever seen". Abbas Kiarostami's 1991 pseudo-documentary masterpiece Life and Nothing More ... (also known as And Life Goes On...)is an astonishing and complex film. As Jonathan Rosenbaum said: "And it wasn't until a few days after I saw Life and Nothing More that the full richness of it began to settle in." In the aftermath of an earthquake which killed more than 50,000 people in northern Iran in 1990, a father and his young son set out to learn the fate of the two young boys who starred in Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend's Home? As they travel through the devastated yet beautiful landscape, their interviews with survivors coalesce into a moving portrait of human resilience. Kiarostami shows a masterful amount of skill in simply presenting human behavior without artifice.

Twenty years after his ground-breaking debut feature, The Report (1977), he was awarded the prestigious Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) award at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Taste of Cherry in 1997. Taste of Cherry is a mythic tale told in the simplest terms but containing a complicated concept of suicide. A desperate man bent on committing suicide attempts to enlist the help of someone to make sure he is buried, dead and not alive. Can he find a compassionate man to do him such an unusual favor in exchange for a large monetary reward? A simple idea, but one that branches off into complex dimensions and sub-themes relating to the human condition, the legitimacy of the act of suicide, meanings of compassion and many other meanings. What the viewer of the film assumes is a story turns out to be only a film-within-a-film.

Kiarostami then took the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at Venice with his follow-up, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), which contrasted rural and urban views on the dignity of labour, the status of women and the benefits of progress by means of a stranger's frustrating sojourn in a remote Kurdish village. In The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) many of the characters are heard, but not seen. There are about thirteen or fourteen characters in the film who remain invisible. In 2001 Abbas Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, traveled to Kampala, Uganda at the request of the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development to supervise a fundraising picture. He then stayed there for 10 days and made "ABC Africa". Kiarostami begins with a little journalism, interviewing a few locals about the epidemic. He interviews an Austrian couple that adopts a wide-eyed African baby. But mostly he lets his camera play across the faces of the children.

In 2002 Kiarostami made Ten, in which he encourages the people in it to make the film for him. He abandons all normal notions of scriptwriting and indeed the distinction between documentary and fiction. By Ten Kiarostami once again casts his masterful cinematic gaze upon the modern sociopolitical landscape of his homeland, this time as seen through the eyes of one woman as she drives through the streets of Tehran over a period of several days. Her journey is composed of ten conversations with various female passengers, including her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute and a jilted bride, as well as her imperious young son. As Kiarostami's 'dashboard cam' eavesdrops on these lively, heart-wrenching road trips, a complex portrait of contemporary Iran comes sharply into focus. Calling it a "work of inspired simplicity", A.O. Scott in The New York Times wrote that Kiarostami, "in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema...He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk."

Kiarostami's 2003 film "Five" is a poetic, radically minimalist film feature. It consists of opening credits and five long shots of nature. It is apparently single-take sequences, shot on hand-held DV camera, along the shores of the Caspian Sea. Despite the lack of a story, the film is far more than just pretty pictures: assembled in order, they comprise a kind of abstract or emotional narrative arc, which moves evocatively from separation and solitude to community, from motion to rest, near-silence to sound and song, light to darkness and back to light again, ending on a note of rebirth and regeneration. Some compared "Five" to the music albums of Wilco and Radiohead.

In 2005 Kiarostami made "Tickets" in collaboration with Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi. "Tickets" has been said to have a stylistic unity many other portmanteau pictures lack.

Kiarostami belongs to a generation of filmmakers who created the so called "New Wave", a movement in Persian cinema that started in the 1960s, before the revolution of 1979 and flourished in the 1970s. Directors like Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Shahid Saless, Bahram Beizai, and Parviz Kimiavi were the pioneers of this movement. They made innovative art films which had highly political and philosophical tones and poetic language. Some, like Saless (who is compared to Robert Bresson), introduced a realist (minimal plot, non-dramatic) style, while others, like Kimiavi (known as the Iranian Godard, mixing fantasy and reality), employed a metaphoric form.

He has also written screenplays for other directors, most notably The White Balloon, for his former assistant Jafar Panahi.

Koker triology
Some critics dubbed films Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (a.k.a. Life and Nothing More, 1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), the "Koker trilogy". Kiarostami resists the designation, noting the films are connected only by the accident of place (Koker is the name of a village in northern Iran). He has suggested it might be more appropriate to consider as a trilogy the latter two titles plus Taste of Cherry (1997), since these, he says, are connected by a theme: the preciousness of life.

Where Is the Friend's Home? depicts the simple story of a young boy who travels from Koker to a neighbouring village to return the notebook of a schoolmate. Life and Nothing More follows a father and his young son as they drive from Tehran to Koker in search of the two young boys from Where Is the Friend's Home?, fearing that the two might have perished in the 1990 earthquake that killed 50,000 people in northern Iran. Through the Olive Trees examines the making of a small scene from Life and Nothing More, forcing us to view a peripheral drama from Life and Nothing More as the central drama in Through the Olive Trees.

Abbas Kiarostami's "Koker Trilogy" is poised between fiction and real life, opening film to new formal experiences. It is his greatest work, argues Gilberto Perez.

Film critic Adrian Martin who emphasises Kiarostami's direct perception of the world, identifying his cinema as being "diagrammatical". Literal "diagrams" inscribed in the landscape, such as the famous zigzagging pathway in the Koker Trilogy, indicate a "geometry of forces of life and of the world". For Martin, these forces are neither complete order, nor complete chaos but rather what lies between these poles.

In British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s chapter on Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy and his later film, "Taste of Cherry" (1997), delay does remove us from fetishism and instead circulates as a trope that performs uncanny links between the films themselves and their production. This may be because in Kiarostami’s artificially constructed wandering aesthetic 'the topography of the death drive is unlike the horizontal direction of the drive in the "dying together" B movies, or Marion’s unconscious drive towards death in the first section of Psycho’, moving instead in repetitive, circular sweeps that attempt to come to terms with the absent moment of trauma. Mulvey’s analysis of how each film in the trilogy deploys then and now again pivots on the dialectic between life and death, but one gets the sense that life wins out here. A flashback of the zigzag path in "And Life Goes On" (1991) triggers the spectator’s memory of the previous film, Where is my Friend’s House? (1987), shot before the earthquake had occurred in Koker, and links to the post-earthquake reconstructions in Through the Olive Trees (1994), the image standing out because of its evocation of the continuity of life. In And Life Goes On, the film's "failure" to index the past event of the earthquake is its testimony to and celebration of life, "the moving spectacle of the world" that continues in the face of discontinuity or trauma. Just as the suicidal protagonist Mr. Badiei reaches his grave in Taste of Cherry, a black screen occurs which evokes "a symbolic death", the finality of this ending undermined by the video sequences that follow which show the actor playing Mr. Badiei lighting a cigarette and the film crew resting. Again, life goes on, but in an off-screen elsewhere. Continuity needs the discontinuous for the purpose of reflection on how life goes on without us or without cinema, but the discontinuous is always shot through with memories seeking new significance in the future. The supposedly still image is a contradiction in terms, for its multiple lines of force always put it into movement, its stillness always being displaced by time. Ontology surpasses technology.

Cinematic genre and legacy
The films of Abbas Kiarostami occupy a unique place in world cinema. Employing a rare simplicity of structure and method that belies the depth of his vision, Kiarostami consistently creates moving, unique and diverse works of art. At once stretching the boundaries of cinematic convention and challenging audience preconceptions about narrative and pacing, his is a counter-cinema with a warm, humanist heart. Though Kiarostami’s films have been compared at various times to those of Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Eric Rohmer, or Jacques Tati, they remain uniquely Kiarostamian. Effortlessly simple and conceptually complex in equal measure; poetic, lyrical, meditative, self-reflexive and increasingly sophisticated, they mix fiction and documentary in unique ways, often presenting fact as fiction and fiction as fact. (Kiarostami has said "We can never get close to the truth except through lying.")

Kiarostami's style is not exactly realistic. He crams it full of loaded moments and symbolic objects, yet his layered, deceptively complex style and his measured pace capture the poetry of everyday life with a delicate cinematic grace.

One of the characteristics of Kiarostami's cinema—present even in early films like the traveler (1974)—is the effective use of non-diegetic and off-screen sounds, particularly monologues and dialogues.

Kiarostami's cinema is not a place for propagating messages. Refering to this point he said: "An artist designs and creates a piece hoping to materialize some thoughts, concepts or feelings through his or her medium. The credibility of great Persian poets like Rumi and Hafiz comes from the very fact that they are composed in such a way that they are fresh and meaningful regardless of the time, place and conditions in which you read them—and this means reading them while doing divination or simply as literature. This is also true in the case of some of our contemporary poets like Forough Farrokhzad". Moreover the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is disregarded in Kiarostami's cinema. Of the filmmakers working in Iran, Abbas Kiarostami is the most direct heir to the legacy of Shahid Saless’ cinema and to the poetic tradition of Forough Farrokhzad. Simple narratives, the use of nonprofessional actors and the blurring of the lines between fiction and documentary are characteristic of Kiarostami’s films, which are essentially feature-length poetic meditations.

The relatively slow or deliberate movements in Kiarostami's films have the potential to affect the viewer on a supra-emotional level, which is to say in manner analogous to music, that the viewer’s physical processes can be affected by the excessively slow rhythms, on a level beyond the intellectual or emotional—it’s almost possible to conjecture that one’s heartbeat and breathing slows in concert with the languid images onscreen. The viewer’s experience of the film thus is less mediated, his or her connection more direct, and in this way perhaps more spiritual. Languid pacing also provides the viewer the time and space to consider the issues raised by the film—not only with the questions that they must ask themselves, but also with the time and space to engage in self-critique. In this way, as in so many others, The Wind Will Carry Us sustains an organic relationship between the film’s form and its content. Indeed, this is the very significance of Kiarostami’s film, according to Michael J. Anderson.

Kiarostami's films and genre are highly controversial. As Jonathan Rosenbaum put it: "There's no getting around the fact that the movies of Abbas Kiarostami divide audiences--in this country, in his native Iran, and everywhere else they're shown."

Some experts, most notably French Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, believe that Kiarostami's cinema offers a new essence or form of film. The central idea of this new essence is that cinema is fundamentally an art of looking at the world. To develop this unsurprising statement into an innovative path for film theory, Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy uses two concepts. One is the concept of gaze or way of looking (regard in French); the other is a conception of the world. These two concepts are inextricably linked since the definition of film, as an art of looking is only made possible through the understanding of how Nancy conceives the world. And the latter is at the heart of Nancy's innovative purpose.

The concept of the gaze is very important here. Where modern cinema often had a passive documentary way of looking (merely to record), Kiarostami's gaze is much more challenging for the spectators. Analysing how Kiarostami uses distanciation techniques, very selective framing, and the well-commented "long cosmic shots", Nancy shows how this cinema "mobilises" the look of the viewer and acts as an eye-opener. Achieving this gaze would be the aim of this realist cinema dealing with a modern conception of the world. Nancy further refines his definition of film by exploring the dimension of movement, and provides many other rich comments on Kiarostami's movies. The set of pictures from Kiarostami's movies included in the middle of the book brings a very clear illustration of Nancy's ability to capture the key features of the director's work. The conversation between the philosopher and the film-maker also reinforces the feeling of a perfect match between Kiarostami's filming and Nancy's thinking. In providing some philosophical thinking on the work of the Iranian director, the book is fascinating.

For decades, classical film theory pondered on the appropriate metaphor to explain the screen: a window or a frame? Was the screen a window on the world, therefore reality captured, or, a frame, reality constructed, a painting and its frame? In some ways Kiarostami is the finest dialectician of these two metaphors.

According to Stephen Bransford, Kiarostami's films do not contain references to the work of other directors, but, instead, contain a myriad of references to his own work. Stephen Bransford wrote "This is not to be confused with the phenomenon of the sequel in the commercial film industry or the cheeky references that directors like Stanley Kubrick have woven into their films." It is believed that Kiarostami's cinema represents an entirely new way to create and understand a body of film work. Kiarostami's films are fashioned into an ongoing dialectic: a film he makes reflects on and partially demystifies an earlier film he has made, a subsequent film reflects and demystifies that film and the earlier film, and so on. The best example of this self-referential cycle is the "Koker trilogy".

In his book "Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present and Future", film critic and philosopher Hamid Dabashi devotes the second chapter to Abbas Kiarostami's cinema. Dabashi's account of Kiarostami's life and cinema revolves around Kiarostami's approach that aims at undoing reality and that adopts a Foucauldian take on Truth. Representing the world through children's eyes mainly, the world of Kiarostami is introduced by Dabashi, a world that metaphorically defies the system and criticizes rigidity and dictatorship and celebrates life.

An aspect of Abbas Kiarostami's artistic achievement that eludes those unfamiliar with Persian poetry and that has, therefore, remained inaccessible to many among his audiences has to do with the way he turns poetic images into cinematic ones. This is most obvious in those Kiarostami films that recall specific texts of Persian poetry more or less explicitly: Where's the Friend's Home and The Wind will Carry Us. However, the esthetic involved here goes much farther back in time and is used much more subtly than these examples suggest. Beyond issues of adaptation of text to film, Kiarostami tends to begin with an insistent will to give visual embodiment to certain specific image-making techniques in Persian poetry, both classical and contemporary, and often ends up enunciating a larger philosophical position, namely the ontological oneness of poetry and film.

According to film professor Jamsheed Akrami, Abbas Kiarostami may have done more than any other contemporary filmmaker to redefine film. Kiarostami has consistently attempted to cool down the film medium by lowering its definition and forcing audience's increased involvement. He has also progressively trimmed the size of his films to reduce the filmmaking experience from a collective endeavor to an almost solitary act of artistic expression.

In "Abbas Kiarostami: The Earth Trembles", Adrian Martin wrote refering to Kiarostami: "The filmmaker who has used the humblest, most modest elements of life, landscape and cinema to generate the most profound, moving and radical artistic gestures of our time". But the precise nature of the road from simplicity to complexity in Kiarostami’s cinema remains "enigmatic, hard to get a focus on", as Martin states. There’s a problem in over-stressing the simplicity – as if he were a Franciscan child-innocent or a hyperhumanitarian Warhol, "finding reality" and letting the camera roll as he absents himself as demiurge – and there’s equally a problem in stressing the complexity, as if the only good movies today must pass through a filter of baroque artifices and convoluted deconstructive paradoxes. Between the self-reflexive games of Close-Up or Through the Olive Trees and the bone that just flows down a stream, saying everything in The Wind Will Carry Us, something eludes us in this magnificent body of work – which is just as well, because that’s a sign of just how great an artist he is.

Kiarostami and Digital-Micro cinema
In a surprise maneuver, filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami announced after the completion of his The Wind Will Carry Us in 2000 that he was joining the DV revolution and would hang up his 35mm cameras in favor of pursuing digital filmmaking exclusively. He's stayed true to his word thus far, offering up his sketchbook of African AIDS orphans with 2001's ABC Africa and following that with the truly radical auto-cinematic exercise of 2002's Ten.

At the turn of 21st century, Kiarostami decided to pass from the cinema of standardised production and distribution (feature films on 35 mm) to a much poorer and solitary cinema shot on a small DV camera, without profiting from the access facilities to the financing of his film projects that success in Cannes opened up for him. Refering to digital cinema Kiarostami said: "Digital video is within the reach of anybody, like a ballpoint pen. I'd even dare to predict that within the next decade, we'll see a burst of interest in film-making as a consequence of the impact of video".

Abbas Kiarostami's film Ten (2002), was an experiment that utilized digital cameras to virtually eliminate the director. Kiarostami fastened cameras to the dashboard of a car, and then allowed his actors to act. There was no film crew in the car, and no director. There is no camera movement, other than the movement of the car which carries the camera. There is minimal cutting and editing.

"Ten is a challenging film, in the best sense of the word", says Alex Munt from Macquarie University. It is a claustrophobic, tense, and at times, frustrating experience. Yet it is also an entirely cinematic film. Ten is Kiarostami’s first digital fiction feature. As Kiarostami attests, the value of this film lies elsewhere: as a "new direction" for cinema. This new direction is towards a "Digital-Micro-Cinema" – defined as micro-budget filmmaking practice allied with a digital production basis.

In the documentary, Kiarostami says—in reference to his film ABC Africa—that "directing was spontaneously and unconsciously eliminated, by which I mean artificial and conventional directing." In 2005, Kiarostami directed a workshop on digital film-making in London Film School. "My film 10 is a couple of years old now," explains Kiarostami to film students, "and today I'm not so fascinated by digital technology. [...] recently it has become clear to me just how few people actually know how to use it properly."

In Ten Kiarostami introduces a new way of cinematic scriptwriting, in a digital context, and the transformation of narrative in this arena. He intoduces several notions: micro-narratives, open screenplay, modularity, repetition, and variation.

According to filmmaker Matthew Clayfield, Kiarostami's work with digital video may be more valuable to cinema than it is to post-cinema, but it also proves that virtually anyone with a camera can contribute to the art form in ways that were previously impossible.

Abbas Kiarostami has however his concerns about digital cinema. He said: "I have somewhat lost my enthusiasm [for digital video] in the last four or five years. Mainly because film students using digital video these days have not really produced anything which is more than superficial or simplistic; so I have my doubts. Despite the great advantages of digital video and the great ease of using the medium, still those who use it have first to understand the sensitivities of how to best use the medium."

Photography and poetry
Abbas Kiarostami, along with Ridley Scott, Jean Cocteau, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Derek Jarman, and Gulzar, is part of a tradition of filmmakers whose artistic expressions are not restricted to one medium, but who show comparable ease in using other forms such as poetry, set designs, painting, or photography to relate their interpretation of the world we live in and to illustrate their understanding of our preoccupations and identities.

Kiarostami is a noted photographer and poet. A bilingual collection of more than 200 of his poems "Walking with the Wind" was published by Harvard University Press. His photographic work includes Untitled Photographs, a collection of over thirty photographs, essentially of snow landscapes, taken in his hometown Tehran, between 1978 and 2003). He has also published a collection of his poems in 1999.

Kiarostami's poetry is reminiscent of the later nature poems of the Persian painter-poet, Sohrab Sepehri. On the other hand the succinct allusion to philosophical truths without the need for deliberation, the non-judgemental tone of the poetic voice and the structure of the poem- absence of personal pronouns, adverbs or over reliance on adjectives - as well as the lines containing a kigo (a season word) gives much of this poetry a Haikuesque characteristic.

Comments on Kiarostami

 * "Film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami." Jean-Luc Godard, French director
 * "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." Martin Scorsese, critically acclaimed American film director

Filmography

 * The Bread and Alley (1970 - short)
 * Breaktime (1972 - short)
 * The Experience (1973)
 * The Traveller (1974)
 * So Can I (1975 - short)
 * Two Solutions for One Problem (1975 - short)
 * Colors (1976 - short)
 * A Wedding Suit (1976)
 * How to Make Use of Leisure Time: Painting (1977 - short)
 * The Report (1977)
 * Tribute to the Teachers (1977 - short)
 * Solution (1978 - short)
 * First Case, Second Case (1979)
 * Dental Hygiene (1980 - short)
 * Orderly or Disorderly (1981 - short)
 * The Chorus (1982 - short)
 * Fellow Citizen (1983)
 * Toothache (1983 - short)
 * First Graders (1984)
 * Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987)
 * The Key (1987 - screenwriter and editor only)
 * Homework (1989)
 * Close-up (1990)
 * Life, and Nothing More... (1991)
 * Journey to the Land of the Traveller (1993 - producer only)
 * Through the Olive Trees (1994)
 * The Journey (1995 - screenwriter only)
 * The White Balloon (1995 - screenwriter only)
 * A propos de Nice, la suite (1995 - segment "Reperages")
 * Lumiere and Company (1996 - segment "Dinner for One")
 * Taste of Cherry (1997)
 * The Birth of Light (1997 - short)
 * The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)
 * Willow and Wind (1999 - screenwriter only)
 * ABC Africa (2001)
 * Ten (2002)
 * The Deserted Station (2002 - story only)
 * Crimson Gold (2003 - screenwriter only)
 * Five (2003)
 * Ten Minutes Older (2003 - not included in Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet or Ten Minutes Older: The Cello)
 * 10 on Ten (2004)
 * The Roads of Kiarostami (2005 - short)
 * Tickets (2005 - middle section)
 * Kiarostami (2008)

Honours and awards

 * Prix Roberto Rossellini (1992)
 * Prix Cine Decouvertes (1992)
 * François Truffaut Award (1993)
 * Pier Paolo Pasolini Award (1995)
 * Federico Fellini Gold Medal, UNESCO (1997)
 * Palme d'Or, Cannes Festival (1997)
 * Honorary Golden Alexander Prize, Greece (1999)
 * Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival (1999)
 * Akira Kurosawa Award (2000)
 * Honorary doctorate, Ecole Normale Supérieure (2003)
 * Konrad Wolf Prize (2003)
 * President of the Jury for Caméra d'Or Award, Cannes Festival (2005)
 * Fellowship of the British Film Institute (2005)
 * Gold Leopard of Honour, Locarno film festival (2005)
 * Prix Henri Langlois Prize (2006)

Books by Kiarostami

 * Abbas Kiarostami, "Abbas Kiarostami": Cahiers du Cinema Livres (October 24 1997) ISBN 2866421965.
 * Abbas Kiarostami, "Walking with the Wind (Voices and Visions in Film)": English translation by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Michael C. Beard, Harvard Film Archive; Bilingual edition (February 28 2002) ISBN 0674008448.
 * Abbas Kiarostami, "10 (ten)": Cahiers du Cinema Livres (September 5 2002) ISBN 2866423461.
 * Abbas Kiarostami, Nahal Tajadod and Jean-Claude Carrière "Avec le vent": P.O.L. (May 5 2002) ISBN 2867448891.
 * Abbas Kiarostami, "Le vent nous emportera": Cahiers du Cinema Livres (September 5 2002) ISBN 286642347X.
 * Abbas Kiarostami, "La Lettre du Cinema": P.O.L. (December 12 1997) ISBN 2867445892.

Secondary literature

 * Erice-Kiarostami. Correspondences, 2006, ISBN 8496540243,  catalogue of an exhibition toghether with the spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice
 * Alberto Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, Saqi Books 2005, ISBN 0863565948
 * Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Contemporary Film Directors), University of Illinois Press 2003 (Paperback), ISBN 0252071115
 * Jean-Luc Nancy, The Evidence of Film - Abbas Kiarostami, Yves Gevaert, Belgium 2001, ISBN 2930128178
 * Jean-claude Bernardet, Caminhos de Kiarostami, Melhoramentos; 1 edition (2004), ISBN 978-8535905717
 * Marco Dalla Gassa, Abbas Kiarostami, Publisher: Mani (2000) ISBN 978-8880121473
 * Youssef Ishaghpour, Le réel, face et pile: Le cinéma d'Abbas Kiarostami , Farrago (2000) ISBN 978-2844900630
 * Alberto Barbera and Elisa Resegotti (editors), Kiarostami, Electa (April 30, 2004) ISBN 978-8837023904
 * Slavoj Žižek, "Lacan: The Silent Partners (Wo Es War)", Verso (April 15, 2006) ISBN 978-1844675494