Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian teacher who opened the doors to a full-fledged cinema

Director Abbas Kiarostami, who died this Sunday five years ago, left a poetic work that not only gave testimony to the artistic vicissitudes that his native Iran experienced, but also Through tapes such as “The Taste of the Cherry”, he opened the doors of the West to cinema in the Middle East.

His career began in the seventies With the trend of short films and extended to the eighties with the production of feature films that were mostly shown in his country except for some Western film festivals.

but she was with “Behind the olive trees” (1994), which was seen at the return of the Mar del Plata festival in 1996, whose name began to spread around the world and already in 1997 with “Cherry Taste” Consecrated with the Palme d’Or in Cannes (shared with “The Eel”, by Shohei Imamura). That was the peak moment of his career.

“If I can remember anything about him, it’s his simplicity. Kiarostami always carried a small camera with him. I was looking for fragments of everyday life. We see there, quite simply, the possibility of truncation of noodles. It wasn’t strange to see him depicting an animal grazing or a tree swaying in the wind for a while, Fremdina Bianco, a director and writer who was under the tutelage of director Iran, told Tlam in 2015 at EICTV’s Authors’ Workshop. . From San Antonio de los Paos, Cuba.

“Kiarostami was very close to us. He offered, for example, to accompany us to the shoot, he wanted to watch, be there,” explained Bianco, who recommended Kiarostami “and filming,” when she told him about her concerns about a short film I had in mind.

“Kiarostami always carried a small camera with him. He was looking for the shards of everyday life. Look there, quite simply, the possibility of pulling out the hair”“

white stranger

As he remembers, one of the tips that the Iranian director gave him was Photography is an exercise and the more you do it, the better you’ll master it.

It’s what he applied to himself all his life, with an imprint on it I used to mix the novel with the documentary; The real life you imagine when writing the script and looking into the viewfinder.

“Detrs de los olivos”, the first film to surpass its quality, was actually the closing of the trilogy that shares the city in which the action takes place, Coker, 350 kilometers from Tehern, to which the director has returned once and for all again due to unexpected events.

Trailer for the movie “Behind the Olive Trees”

Previous works were “Where’s my friend’s house?” , in which a Cocker kid must return a notebook to a classmate; And after the 1991 earthquake, Life Goes On, in which a local girl and boy play a newlywed couple who occupy a dilapidated house. Heroes, in real life, end up in love.

“I think that Abbas reminded me of the importance of being sensitive to my surroundings and also taught me to face fear”, explained Bianco of that eye that knew how to see fantasy in reality or reality in fantasy, depending on the point it wanted to interpret.

Kiarostami belongs to the so-called generation The new wave of Iranian cinema, born in the 1960s, which has become universally popular in the following, with works differing in abundance in that transition through their philosophical and political, realistic or figurative content chosen by a section of critics as the subject of fidelity and analysis.

Kiarostami’s work challenges current cinema, particularly in its formal aspects, in the sensitivity and tension of weaving the novel into documentaries.“

Such as, “Cherry flavor” who has been in Argentina on the bill for nine months Exceeding 130,000 spectators, it opened the door to domestic distribution, and allowed audiences around the world, to renew the look increasingly focused on cinema in one country and very rarely always well received from Europe or Asia.

Bianco also reflected on the multiculturalism that Kiarostami contributed to, but from his experience in the workshop: “He also gave me friends, such as director Hira Nabi from Pakistan; Shisher Jha, from India; Esai Bee from Mexico, and a few others, with whom I still exchange Today’s scripts, settings, and projects. What more could I ask for than to feed myself such diverse and valuable opinions?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuBLXD5B84g

Taste of Cherry (1997) – Dir. A. Kiarostami (SUBS. Castellano)

This cultural mix was present when he was the jury chairman of the Mar del Plata Film Festival in 1998, but also in other films that left Iran’s borders, such as “ABC Africa” (2001), about the HIV epidemic. in Uganda. Also by publishing the first bilingual-Farsi-Spanish version of his poetry collection “Compaero del viento”, or directing Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche in Certified Copy (2010), a film banned in Iran, but it competed in Cannes. ..

“Kiarostami’s work challenges current cinema, especially in its formal aspects, in the sensitivity of weaving the novel with the documentary and putting it in a state of tension. It offers us a poetic experience of time and invites us back to what is important: that little thing in front of us that many times we don’t see,” he spoke Bianco about this director who first broke the borders of his country, and then the barrier of time.