1970s In 1970 when the
Iranian New Wave began with
Dariush Mehrjui's film
Gāv, Kiarostami helped set up a filmmaking department at the
Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon) in Tehran. Its debut production, and Kiarostami's first film, was the twelve-minute
The Bread and Alley (1970), a
neorealistic short film about a schoolboy's confrontation with an aggressive dog.
Breaktime followed in 1972. The department became one of Iran's most noted film studios, producing not only Kiarostami's films but acclaimed Persian films such as
The Runner and
Bashu, the Little Stranger. When discussing his first film, he stated:
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 film making that he had become accustomed to. In 1975, Kiarostami directed two short films
So Can I and
Two Solutions for One Problem. In early 1976, he released
Colors, followed by the fifty-four-minute film
A Wedding Suit, a story about three teenagers coming into conflict over a suit for a wedding. Kiarostami then directed
Report (1977). With a 112-minute runtime, it was considerably longer than his previous work. The film revolved around the life of a
tax collector accused of accepting bribes; suicide was among its themes. In 1979, he produced and directed
First Case, Second Case.
1980s In the early 1980s, Kiarostami directed several short films including
Toothache (1980),
Orderly or Disorderly (1981), and
The Chorus (1982). In 1983, he directed
Fellow Citizen. It was not until his release of ''
Where Is the Friend's Home?'' (1987) that he began to gain recognition outside Iran. These films created the basis of his later productions. The film tells a simple account of a conscientious eight-year-old schoolboy's quest to return his friend's notebook in a neighboring village lest his friend be expelled from school. The traditional beliefs of Iranian rural people are portrayed. The film has been noted for its poetic use of the Iranian rural landscape and its realism, both important elements of Kiarostami's work. Kiarostami made the film from a child's point of view. But, Kiarostami did not consider the three films to comprise a trilogy. He suggested that the last two titles plus
Taste of Cherry (1997) comprise a trilogy, given their common theme of the preciousness of life. In 1987, Kiarostami was involved in the screenwriting of
The Key, which he edited but did not direct. In 1989, he released
Homework.
1990s Kiarostami's first film of the decade was
Close-Up (1990), which narrates the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated film-maker
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. The family suspects theft as the motive for this charade, but the impersonator, Hossein Sabzian, argues that his motives were more complex. The part-documentary, part-staged film examines Sabzian's moral justification for usurping Makhmalbaf's identity, questioning his ability to sense his cultural and artistic flair. Ranked No. 42 in
British Film Institute's
The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time,
Close-Up received praise from directors such as
Quentin Tarantino,
Martin Scorsese,
Werner Herzog,
Jean-Luc Godard, and
Nanni Moretti and was released across Europe. In 1992, Kiarostami directed
Life, and Nothing More..., regarded by critics as the second film of the
Koker trilogy. The film follows a father and his young son as they drive from Tehran to Koker in search of two young boys who they fear might have perished in the 1990 earthquake. As the father and son travel through the devastated landscape, they meet earthquake survivors forced to carry on with their lives amid disaster. That year Kiarostami won a
Prix Roberto Rossellini, the first professional film award of his career, for his direction of the film. The last film of the so-called
Koker trilogy was
Through the Olive Trees (1994), which expands a peripheral scene from
Life and Nothing More into the central drama. Critics such as
Adrian Martin have called the style of filmmaking in the
Koker trilogy as "diagrammatical", linking the zig-zagging patterns in the landscape and the geometry of forces of life and the world. A flashback of the zigzag path in
Life and Nothing More... (1992) in turn triggers the spectator's memory of the previous film, ''Where Is the Friend's Home?
from 1987, shot before the earthquake. This symbolically links to the post-earthquake reconstruction in Through the Olive Trees
in 1994. In 1995, Miramax Films released Through the Olive Trees'' in the US theaters. Kiarostami next wrote the screenplays for
The Journey and
The White Balloon (1995), for his former assistant
Jafar Panahi. It is the drama of a man, Mr. Badii, determined to commit suicide. The film involved themes such as morality, the legitimacy of the act of suicide, and the meaning of compassion. Kiarostami directed
The Wind Will Carry Us in 1999, which won the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the
Venice International Film Festival. The film contrasted rural and urban views on the
dignity of labor, addressing themes of gender equality and the benefits of progress, by means of a stranger's sojourn in a remote
Kurdish village. In 2001, Kiarostami and his assistant, Seifollah Samadian, traveled to
Kampala,
Uganda at the request of the United Nations
International Fund for Agricultural Development, to film a documentary about programs assisting Ugandan orphans. He stayed for ten days and made
ABC Africa. The trip was originally intended as research in preparation for the filming, but Kiarostami ended up editing the entire film from the video footage shot there. The high number of orphans in Uganda has resulted from the deaths of parents in the
AIDS epidemic.
Time Out editor and
National Film Theatre chief programmer, Geoff Andrew, said in referring to the film: "Like his previous four features, this film is not about death but life-and-death: how they're linked, and what attitude we might adopt with regard to their symbiotic inevitability." The following year, Kiarostami directed
Ten, revealing an unusual method of filmmaking and abandoning many scriptwriting conventions. In 2003, Kiarostami directed
Five, a poetic feature with no dialogue or characterization. It consists of five long shots of nature which are single-take sequences, shot with a hand-held
DV camera, along the shores of the
Caspian Sea. Although the film lacks a clear storyline, Geoff Andrew argues that the film is "more than just pretty pictures". He adds, "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."He notes the degree of artifice concealed behind the apparent simplicity of the imagery. In 2005, Kiarostami contributed the central section to
Tickets, a
portmanteau film set on a train traveling through Italy. The other segments were directed by
Ken Loach and
Ermanno Olmi. In 2008, Kiarostami directed the feature
Shirin, which features close-ups of many notable Iranian actresses and the French actress
Juliette Binoche as they watch a film based on a partly mythological
Persian romance tale of
Khosrow and Shirin, with themes of female self-sacrifice. The film has been described as "a compelling exploration of the relationship between image, sound and female spectatorship."
2010s Certified Copy (2010), again starring Juliette Binoche, was made in Tuscany and was Kiarostami's first film to be shot and produced outside Iran.
Roger Ebert praised the film, noting that "Kiarostami is rather brilliant in the way he creates offscreen spaces." Binoche won the
Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance in the film. Kiarostami's penultimate film,
Like Someone in Love, set and shot in Japan, received largely positive reviews from critics. Kiarostami's final film
24 Frames was released posthumously in 2017. An
experimental film based on 24 of Kiarostami's still photographs,
24 Frames enjoyed a highly positive critical reception, with a
Rotten Tomatoes score of 92%.
Film festival work Kiarostami was a jury member at numerous film festivals, most notably the
Cannes Film Festival in
1993,
2002 and
2005. He was also the president of the
Caméra d'Or Jury in Cannes Film Festival 2005. He was announced as the president of the Cinéfondation and short film sections of the
2014 Cannes Film Festival. Other representatives include the
Venice Film Festival in 1985, the
Locarno International Film Festival in 1990, the
San Sebastian International Film Festival in 1996, the
São Paulo International Film Festival in 2004, the Capalbio Cinema Festival in 2007 (in which he was president of the jury), and the
Küstendorf Film and Music Festival in 2011. He also made regular appearances at many other film festivals across Europe, including the
Estoril Film Festival in Portugal. ==Cinematic style==