Abbas Kiarostami is an Iranian director who shot a number of highly artistic poetic tapes, widely known in Iran.
The film "Taste of Cherry", Abbas Kiarostami shot it in 1997, brought the director world fame. Abbas also earned many prestigious international film awards during his career.
Creative way: the beginning
Abbas Kiarostami was born on June 22, 1940 in the capital of Iran, Tehran. From childhood, Kiarostami was fond of painting. At 18, the guy even won an artist contest. His passion for painting inspired him to leave home and enroll in the School of Fine Arts at Tehran University. Specialization Abbas chose graphic design and drawing. In order to have something to live on, simultaneously with his studies, Kiarostami worked as a traffic controller.
In the 1960s, Abbas earned his living by advertising. He drew posters and came up with creative ideas for advertising companies. During the period from 1962 to 1966, the director shot about 150 commercials for Iranian television.
The next step in the guy’s career was the creation of captions for films and illustrations for children's books.
Cinema
In the 1970s, Kiarostami began making his own films. He worked very productively - more than 40 tapes were released during this period of his life by Abbas Kiarostami. Films in this category are not only feature films, but also documentaries, both full-length and short.
For the first time as a director, they started talking about a man after the release of his "Cocker trilogy". It includes the films “Where is the friend’s house?”, “And life goes on”, “Through the olives”. The tapes are connected by a scene - the small village of Koker in northern Iran.
In 1990, the picture "Close-up" about a fraudster who pretended to be a filmmaker appeared on the screens. The trial of the protagonist was to decide whether to consider his actions a simple crime or an act of creativity.
"Taste of Cherry"
The director himself did not consider the first film to be part of the trilogy. In his opinion, the second and third films were more suited to the picture "Taste of Cherry", which he shot in 1997. In his opinion, for all these works the common thing was not so much the scene of action as the main idea - the value of life.
In the movie "Taste of Cherry," Abbas addresses the topic of suicide and how reasonable and appropriate it is. The film was warmly received by critics from around the world and brought the director "Golden Palm Branch" at the Cannes Film Festival.
World recognition
In 1990, Abbas Kiarostami’s tape “The Wind Will Take Us” comes out. The film falls into the program of the Venice Film Festival. The speech in this work of the director is about how the ideas about life differ between urban and rural residents. The concepts of labor, gender equality, and progress are compared. A feature of the film was that some of the characters are not shown in the frame. Only their voices are heard. The jury of the festival awarded the tape with the prize "Silver Lion".
The next significant award awaited Abbas in 2000. In the city of San Francisco, the director was awarded the Akira Kurosawa Prize for directorial achievements. Kiarostami did not leave a reward for himself. He gave it to actor Behruz Vosugi from Iran to express his gratitude to him for what he does for Iranian cinema.
The new creation of Abbas, the picture "Five", was released in 2003. In this work, the creators dispensed with dialogue and characters. The film is five excerpts of filming nature. The action takes place on the coast of the Caspian Sea.
The film "Copy is true" appeared before the public in 2010. Abbas Kiarostami shot it not in Iran, which is not typical for the director. In the picture, the Frenchwoman and the British collide. "Copy is true" talks about the consequences of this clash. The film claimed the "Golden Palm Branch" of the Cannes Film Festival. As a result, actress Juliette Binoche received the award, who played the main role in this picture.
The author’s new work, the film “As if Someone is in Love,” was released in 2010. Reviews received mixed. Filmed in Japan.
Last works
In the last years of his life, Abbas preferred to deal with documentary and pseudo-documentary tapes.
The work "Alphabet: Africa" tells us about the director’s journey through Africa. The film "Ten" is the story of ten girls, minibus passengers, built in the form of a conversation between them and the driver. Among them are both a prostitute and a deeply religious woman.
The director also shot one of the short stories for the Almanac "Ticket". Ermano Olmi and Ken Loach worked with him on the almanac. The action in the short story takes place in a car of a European fast train.
Kiarostami had a significant impact on many young filmmakers in Iran and around the world. The dissident director Jafar Panahi, based on the Abbas script, shot the Crimson Gold film in 2003. The film aroused great interest at the Cannes Film Festival, but was banned for showing in Iran itself.
In recent years, Abbas became interested in photography. Photo exhibitions were held in major world capitals, where Abbas Kiarostami presented his works to the public. The photographs he took were mostly landscape. They have fields, mountains, trees. As in his other works, in the photo Kiarostami tried to reflect the images of eternity and time.
Death
Abbas Kiarostami died July 4, 2016 in Paris. At this moment he was 76 years old. The cause of death is considered a mistake by Iranian doctors who did a famous director an operation to remove polyps in the intestine. After this intervention, Kiarostami began complications and sepsis. He went to France for treatment, but it was already too late. In France, the director found cancer. The funeral was organized in Tehran.