Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami, the leading international figure of Iranian film bar none. At the beginning of the 1970s he helped create an important center of Iranian cinema at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran, and his short children's movies indicated a new creative direction. He was one of the men behind the greatest successes of the Iranian New Wave that peaked in the 1970s, but he earned his international reputation after the Iranian Revolution.

In the 1990s he captivated Western audiences with Close-Up (1990), a reconstruction partaking of both fact and fiction. He soon became a permanent film festival fixture thanks to humanistic pictures such as Life, and Nothing More... (1992), Through the Olive Trees (1994), and Taste of Cherry (1997), awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes. His filmography also includes demanding formal experiments such as the sparely narrated Ten (2002).

MFF Karlovy Vary