Celebrated
Iranian director, whose Taste of Cherry won Cannes’ top prize in 1997, remained
in the country after the Islamic revolution and continued to flourish
Abbas Kiarostami, the multi-award-winning Iranian director whose 1997
film Taste of Cherry was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, has died aged 76.
“Abbas Kiarostami, who had travelled to France for treatment, has
died,” reported the semi-official Isna news agency on
Monday. Iran’s house of cinema confirmed the report, Isna said. Kiarostami
had been diagnosed with gastrointestinal cancer in March 2016, and had
undergone a series of operations, including in
Paris last month.
Kiarostami’s rise to the status of one of the world’s foremost auteurs
started from relatively humble beginnings. He was born in 1940 in Tehran, and
originally studied painting at the University of Tehran; Kiarostami began
working as a graphic designer and went on to shoot dozens of commercials for
Iranian TV. In 1969 he joined Kanun (the Centre for the Intellectual
Development of Children and Young Adults), where he ran the film department,
and was able to make his own films. In 2005
Kiarostami told the Guardian: “We were supposed to make films that
dealt with childhood problems. At the beginning it was just a job, but it was
the making of me as an artist.”
In the two decades he worked for Kanun, Kiarostami made films
continuously, including his first feature, The Report, in 1977. He managed to
negotiate the transition triggered by the Khomeini revolution, re-working the
films he made to try and accommodate the demands of a new set of censors.
Unlike many of his film-industry peers, Kiarostami decided to remain in Iran after the revolution, likening himself
to “a tree that is rooted in the ground”. “[If you] transfer it from one place
to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit ... If I had left my country, I
would be the same as the tree.”
It was while he was at Kanun also that Kiarostami embarked on what
would become known as the Koker trilogy, the three films that established his
international reputation as a director of considerable sensitivity and
intellectual rigour. The first, Where Is the Friend’s Home?, was completed in
1987, and its sympathetic story of a schoolkid’s attempt to return a classmate’s
exercise book, won Kiarostami’s first major award, the Bronze Leopard at the
Locarno film festival. Life, and Nothing More..., finished in 1992, saw him
blend fiction and documentary in his account of his search for the earlier
film’s cast after the devastating earthquake of 1990, while 1994’s Through the
Olive Trees revolved around the making of a fictional second instalment of
Life, and Nothing More
However, the hostile censorship
climate meant he had already left his job at Kanun, shortly after completing
another film, Homework, in 1989. Close-Up, from 1990 was an agile docu-fiction
about a man who had been put on trial for impersonating Kiarostami’s fellow
film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. At the same time, Kiarostami wrote and produced
films by other directors, most notably The White Balloon, the 1995 directorial
debut of Jafar Panahi, who had worked on Through the Olive Trees as an
assistant director.
Kiarostami’s upward ascension as a major auteur was confirmed in 1997,
when his seventh feature, Taste of Cherry – a study of a man driving around
looking for someone to help him commit suicide – was awarded the Palme d’Or
(jointly, with The Eel, directed by Shohei Imamura).
Kiarostami’s subsequent career alternated between formal features, such
as the poetic drama The Wind Will Carry Us and Ten, which exploited Kiarostami’s
fondness for filming and photographing in cars, and outside ideas
such as ABC Africa, which arose after Kiarostami was invited to film Aids
orphans in Uganda, and Tickets, a three-part film made with Ken Loach and
Ermanno Olmi. He also moved into what can only be described as minimalist
documentary with Five (subtitled Dedicated to Ozu), which comprised a series of
lengthy shots of Spanish landscape, and Shirin, composed of a series of
headshots of women watching an unseen film.
Latterly, Kiarostami found it increasingly difficult to film in Iran,
as political strife grew in the wake of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise to power.
His next two films, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love were filmed abroad,
in Italy and Japan respectively, even if they dealt in Kiarostami’s familiar
themes of authenticity and relationships. Both were screen at Cannes, and the
former won the festival’s best actress award for Juliette Binoche.
Last
week, Kiarostami was among 683 film-makers asked to join the Academy
of Motion Pictures and Sciences; many commented on the belated nature of the
invite.
Kiarostami was married once, in 1969, to Parvin Amir-Gholi, but they
divorced in 1982. They had two sons together: Ahmad (a mulitmedia publisher)
and Bahman (a documentary-maker).
Representative
Image
Source: theguardian
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