Considered by many to be one of the finest filmmakers the world has ever seen, Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami‘s works have inspired multiple generations of young students and aspiring directors. Through his poetic masterpieces, Kiarostami conducted striking existential examinations of life that transcended the limitations of the cinematic medium.
By 1970, he began directing his own films, developing a style shaped by a minimalist aesthetic and improvisational techniques as well as a distinctive blend of fiction and documentary. Anchored in the art of simplicity, Kiarostami’s cinema has a charming spontaneity, what Walter Salles called an “immediacy and truth . . . as if nothing is truly staged.” Yet the role of the filmmaker is often a palpable presence in the films, occasionally observing the action via wide-angle shots that show cause and effect in a single, exquisite long take. Probing the meaning of existence, isolation, solidarity, and death, Kiarostami offers a poetic portrayal of life as it is.
The Wind Will Carry Us (Iran, 1998, 118′), presented at SIFF, wrapped up an extremely eventful decade for Kiarostami during which he managed to solidify his status as one of the greatest living filmmakers.
Short Synopsis: A film crew arrives in a small village in Iranian Kurdistan to make a film on lament – after all, an elderly woman is dying. But as they find themselves waiting for her to pass away, days pass uneventfully and life goes on at its normal pace, until the crew decides to depart. With his typical austere and abstract lyricism, the auteur who put Iranian cinema on the map conveys the light, the taste, and the soft breeze that touches the human body when afterlife bleeds into the everyday.
