Iran's most celebrated filmmaker once paid for art school by directing traffic
Abbas Kiarostami funded his fine-arts studies in Tehran by working as a traffic policeman, then shot around 150 television adverts. His quiet films about children, villages and long conversations in cars went on to win the Palme d'Or and land Close-Up among Sight and Sound's 50 greatest films.
Born in Tehran in 1940, Kiarostami began as a painter and won a competition at 18 just before entering the University of Tehran's School of Fine Arts to study painting and graphic design. Through the 1960s he designed posters, made commercials, created film title sequences and illustrated children's books. Beyond directing, he remained a poet, photographer and graphic designer all his life.
In 1970, the year Dariush Mehrjui's Gāv launched the Iranian New Wave, he helped found a film department at Kanoon, Tehran's institute for the intellectual development of young people. Its first production was his twelve-minute debut, The Bread and Alley, about a schoolboy facing down an aggressive dog; he later recalled wrestling with a small child, a dog, an amateur crew and a grumbling cameraman who disliked his unconventional methods. The department grew into one of Iran's leading studios. The Traveler, in 1974, followed a boy who cons his neighbours to reach a football match in Tehran, and cemented his taste for realism and journeys of body and spirit.
International recognition came with Where Is the Friend's House? in 1987, in which an eight-year-old tries to return a classmate's notebook in the next village so the friend is not expelled. With two later films set around the village of Koker and the 1990 earthquake that killed 40,000 people, it became known as the Koker trilogy, though Kiarostami himself preferred to group the last two with Taste of Cherry, linked by the preciousness of life.
His signatures included child protagonists, rural settings, fixed cameras in moving cars, Persian poetry and a teasing blend of fiction and documentary. Taste of Cherry won the Palme d'Or in 1997, and in a 2018 BBC Culture critics' poll three of his films ranked among the 100 best in foreign languages. Late in his career he worked abroad for the first time, making Certified Copy in Italy and Like Someone in Love in Japan. He died in 2016.
Source: Abbas Kiarostami
