Abbas Kiarostami

Simplistically made and rich in content, Kiarostami's in-car digital experiment defies prohibitions and brings to the surface secrets and lies of the Iranian society, especially those related to the weak, in the eyes of the authorities, sex. — Abbas Kiarostami delivers a visual social experiment in the form of dialogues between an Iranian female driver and the people she hosts in her car, a closed micrograph about the country's society. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2002

Abbas Kiarostami won an award at Venice for this spare, generous portrait of an Iranian village seen through the eyes of a man from the city. All he seems to do is keep setting off in search of a phone signal, yet those trips end up telling you a surprising amount about life. — Three men in a jeep cross the hills of Kurdistan looking for a small mountain village, where a boy shows them a place to stay. They claim to be engineers and the villagers decide they’re hunting for treasure, but they’re really a film crew who have come to record a family’s mourning rites and are waiting for an old woman to die. Death, however, won’t come when it’s called. — CinemAvvenire' Award | Venice Film Festival | 1999 FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1999 Grand Special Jury Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1999

Once again the director of “Taste of Cherry” lets fiction and reality bleed into each other, in a film about cinema, Iran and love. Two young actors played lovers in Kiarostami’s previous film, and when the cameras stopped, the young man found he really had fallen for her. — The third part of Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, named after the village where all three films are set, follows the actors through the shoot of his previous film, “And Life Goes On”, made among the survivors of an earthquake that levelled a corner of northern Iran. Hossein is cast as a young husband opposite a girl who has already turned down his proposal, which her family took as an insult. Now they have to play newlyweds. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1994 Silver Hugo Best Film | Chicago International Film Festival | 1994 Critics Award | São Paulo International Film Festival | 1994

In beautiful Tuscany, Kiarostami (“Taste of Cherry”) brings together Cannes winner Juliette Binoche and William Shimell for what begins as an ordinary conversation between two strangers. Slowly it becomes a romance in which truth and illusion grow harder and harder to tell apart. — A British writer arrives in Tuscany to present his book and give a lecture, and an art lover, hoping for a worthwhile conversation, leaves him her number so they can meet later. Their first conversation is awkward, but it slowly grows warmer and more intimate, until a café owner takes them for a couple fifteen years into their marriage. Neither of them corrects her. Could it be they already know each other? — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2010 Best Actress (Juliette Binoche) | Cannes Film Festival | 2010

Save this Palme d’Or winner for a day when you can’t see the point of going on. Kiarostami puts a man who has decided to die behind the wheel, and out of his long drive he builds one of the most moving films about what keeps us alive. Afterwards, even cherries taste different. — Mr Badii has decided to kill himself, and all he needs is someone to come at dawn and bury him. So he drives the hills outside Tehran, offering the job to strangers he picks up. A young soldier bolts and a seminarian refuses, but a man who works at the Natural History Museum says yes, for reasons of his own, and then he starts to talk. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1997