For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life.
Janus Films is proud to present a touring retrospective spanning Abbas Kiarostami’s nearly five-decade career. This series includes new restorations, undertaken by the Criterion Collection and MK2, of The Koker Trilogy,Taste of Cherry,The Wind Will Carry Us, and rarely screened shorts and documentaries.
In 2000, Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS.
In the aftermath of a 1990 earthquake that left 30,000 dead, Kiarostami returned to the village of Koker where his camera surveys not only the devastation but the teeming life that continues in its wake.
“The mother of all my films,” according to Abbas Kiarostami, starts out as a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran alleys carrying a loaf of bread.
An old man strolls through the noisy streets of Rasht, and when his hearing aid is knocked out of his ear, the film’s sound goes off, mimicking the silence that envelops him.
Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and the fiction-documentary hybrid Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work.
Ostensibly also a film for children, this picture-book essay about the range of hues that brighten our world has the air of a delightfully playful formalistic exercise.
Based on a story by Amir Naderi, who also cowrote the film, this slice of a fourteen-year-old boy’s life follows his efforts to fend for himself in the big city, working as a tea server and assistant in a photographer’s studio, running errands, and, briefly, exchanging glances with a pretty middle-class girl.
Kiarostami’s fascination with both Tehrani car culture and the uses of power in postrevolutionary society combine in this documentary about a traffic officer assigned to enforce driving restrictions in central Tehran (a locale near the director’s office at Kanoon).
Made in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow, this extraordinary film serves as a Rorschach blot for people in a revolutionary mind-set.
Inspired by his work at Kanoon and his own sons’ schooling, the first of Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education looks in on a schoolyard of chanting, playful boys but mainly transpires in the office of a supervisor who has to deal with latecomers and discipline problems.
In Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there
Evidently the first installment in a series that didn’t continue, this instructional film shows idle twelve- and sixteen-year-old brothers learning how to improve their surroundings by painting an old door.
The rare early Kiarostami film made outside of Kanoon, and one of the most downbeat of his features, this adult drama concerns a civil servant besieged on two fronts: he’s accused of taking bribes, and his marriage is collapsing (Kiarostami has admitted this latter element was autobiographical).
The rare Kanoon film that doesn’t involve children, this unusual road movie was made during the revolution and afforded Kiarostami what may have been a welcome escape from the capital.
The first of Kiarostami’s films made for, rather than about, children was an experiment in combining live action and animation, done in collaboration with animator Nafiseh Riahi.
Middle-aged Mr. Badii drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran, searching for someone to rescue or bury him, in Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami’s emotionally complex meditation on life and death.
As she roams the streets of Tehran in her car, a recently divorced woman (Mania Akbari) chauffeurs a rotating cast of passengers, from her combative young son to a heartbroken wife abandoned by her husband to a defiant young sex worker going about her job.
A TV crew from Tehran arrives in a remote Kurdish village to film an unusual funeral ceremony but are stymied when the old woman they expect to die clings to life.
Though much of this film is a straightforward lecture about dental hygiene delivered by a dentist facing the camera, it still manages to be persuasively Kiarostami-esque in its description of young Mohammad-Reza’s life at home and school before he falls prey to tooth woes.
Kiarostami’s first feature focuses on a boy in a provincial city so avid to get to Tehran to see a soccer match that he’ll lie to adults and cheat other kids.
An assignment from the Ministry of Education, this documentary from the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty includes interviews with officials who predictably praise teaching as a sacred, noble, and honorable profession.
This simple moral tale seems to prefigure Where Is the Friend’s House? Two young schoolboys, Dara and Nader, are friends until Dara returns Nader’s notebook torn and Nader retaliates in kind, setting off an escalating battle that leads to destruction of property and physical injury.
In a trilevel shopping arcade, a teenage boy who works for a tailor is besieged by two other boys who want to borrow a new suit to wear on a social outing before it’s turned over to its owner.
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing trilogy of films set in the northern Iranian village of Koker takes a premise of fable-like simplicity—a boy searches for the home of his classmate whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday.
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