Watching Abbas Kiarostami during isolation

Known to so many a cinephile, his films broadened the space yet tightened the gap between art house cinema and the simple, effortless act of watching a film.

Kiarostami’s movies always ran between fiction and reality, wherein some scenes from his oeuvre show a bite of documentary-like mood. Reversing the stereotype to create his own flavour, the elements of a became truths that one cannot miss—because Kiarostami is a man of urgency.

In presenting his film’s narratives as a bowl full of lies was a cinematic proclivity for him to arrive at the truth without a trace of lie. It is unforced, it did not look like a struggle: it simply just is, and that’s how reality works. 

Marked by scenes of apparent quietness and contemplative, thoughtful conversations, Kiarostami comes to terms with his films both as director and as part of the audience. How he paints the picture of being lost is of another realm: it is not dependent on anything, apropos to nothing, just like loneliness—it can stem from nothing.

In Close Up (1990), the act of blending fact with fiction becomes a blurry experience. Is this a documentary? A drama based on a true story? Kiarostami’s decision to hire the actual people involved a fraudulent crime that actually happened, and reenacting actual conversations, the film achieved a greatness that rarely crowns a director that marks him as prolific. 

Shaping the reality with the words and angling he chose, the film took a turn from being a film to being a slice-of-life sermon masquerading as pure cinematic imagery. You never really learn how to get around Kiarostami’s narrative, and that makes him a positive enigma. 

In Taste of Cherry (1997), the structures of a talkathon engages more than conversations. It is, after all, a man wanting to end his life and talking about his desire to do it three complete strangers he drives around the capital.

The takes flight in long shots, deep silences, and sparse dialogue between the main character, the earth surrounding Tehran’s not yet developed lands, his car, and the people he meets. The emptiness of Iran somehow how filled the story with such grace and meaning that it somehow acts as the purgatory between hell or glory. 

A crucial fact in Kiarostami’s films is its desire to retain its silence yet disquiet treatment of a story and how it should take evidence in the screen. Man’s loneliness manifests in his films like a conversational confession between a doctor announcing to a family that their relative jas succumbed to an illness.

Evening the scope between the personal and the political, Kiarostami never forgets that Iran, a politically challenged nation, also never forgets to clear the coast with talks about the effects of fascism, and what it does to a community, what it does to a man. He never leaves space for cultural myopia to have an exposure. 

In a politically-charged time like this, where majority of the populations is on isolation, it is without question that one must engage in Kiarostami’s features. Because we never know what we find out within ourselves, what we learn about ourselves, in the most intimate ways as his characters find themselves.