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Forget Everything Extra
As a filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami has pushed the boundaries of the artform, producing works that have delighted critics and baffled the Iranian authorities. When the director attended the Midnight Sun Festival in Finland, Seán Crosson and Anne Karhio were there to report the insights.
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has established a reputation as one of the most important contemporary world filmmakers. Over his career he has articulated a distinctive cinematic voice, enthralling festival audiences while occasionally bemusing those who sought the traditional markers of Hollywood cinema: plot, action and predictable narrative. However, Kiarostami’s is a patient poetic cinema more attuned to the rhythms of day to day life than such commercial considerations. His subjects have revealed a concern, above all, with the less well off – whether it’s the voice of Iranian women lamenting their limited opportunities in that society (10, 2002), or the plight of earthquake victims in the Koker and Poshteh regions of Northern Iran (Through the Olive Trees, 1994, and And Life Goes On…, 1991). Recently Kiarostami attended the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Northern Finland, where a retrospective of his finest work took place – from his first short film The Bread and Alley to his 2002 film 10. He offered some unique insights into his life, career, and the filmmaking process.
Kiarostami was born into a large, artistic family in Tehran in 1940. ‘My father was an artist, a painter, he painted on walls. In those times it was very common in Iran, a bit like frescos. I remember when we had poetry nights at home; my father loved poems. I couldn’t say we had an intellectual home; the whole family was into poetry – bad poetry, but everybody was trying.’ One of the recurring subjects of Kiarostami’s films has been children, influenced by his own experiences as a child in Iran. He describes his first school as ‘very similar to that depicted in Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987)’, the film that more than any other brought him to the attention of an international audience. The film won glowing reviews worldwide, and several major festival awards including the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival. Above all, the film was marked by the compelling performances of the cast (a characteristic of all Kiarostami’s films), composed mostly of non-actors. Babek Ahmed Poor was particularly fine in the central role of schoolboy Ahmed, who must return his classmate’s copybook or see his friend expelled from school. Kiarostami has indicated his own rather unique approach to finding such actors and achieving these performances: ‘When I have an idea in my head, I don’t develop it too far. Let’s think there’s a person, in his early 50s, who is a director of a festival – this kind of a character. I find such a person in his natural environment. I follow him without him realizing it for some time, I try to listen to his talk. I try to approach him to talk with him about my ideas, without telling him about things too much yet. And instead of changing the person to fit my idea, I change my ideas to fit his personality. So this person will become a real person to me, not one that is simply a result of my imagination.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 118.
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