My Hero Kiarostami

My Hero Kiarostami

‘I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame.’

 Abbas Kiarostami is an Iranian filmmaker, photographer, painter and poet. He studied Fine Art at Tehran University. Kiarostami is the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or.

'I wanted somehow to eternalize those moments of passion and pain.’

I first met Kiarostami when I was 16. It was early September. I had just started art college. I was sleeping with a man who was much older than me. He was the first person to ever see me naked. On one occasion, I went over to his apartment and he was watching Taste of Cherry. I didn't pay much attention at all to the film, instead very much focused on the tingling sensation rushing through my body every time he held my hand. Afterwards, I could only remember that the film had seemed somewhat boring and very grown up.

I thought back on it for years, trying to conjure up the name of what film we had watched. But all I could remember were subtitles, and an image of a car winding up long winding roads. For the longest time I thought we had watched a film by Kurosawa. But then one day, I came across an article about the photography of Abbas Kiarostami. Grateful for his name to have finally returned to me - I could watch the film again. 

 

 'It wouldn't help you to know and I can't talk about it and you wouldn't understand. It's not because you don't understand but you can't feel what I feel. You can sympathize, understand, show compassion. But feel my pain? No. You suffer and so do I. I understand you. You comprehend my pain, but you can't feel it.' 

What resonated with me in Taste of Cherry, like much of Kiarostami's work, was its loneliness.  The vastness of Iran's landscape and the sparse, concise dialogue mirrored my own loneliness, which extended beyond the pain of the ending of my relationship with the older man. It also reflected the deeper eternal, almost primordial, vast and solitary experience that is consciousness. 

Watching the film, I could sit with my grief and my guilt.

'I feel the cinema that will last longer is the poetic cinema, not the cinema that is just storytelling... Poetry always runs away from you—it’s very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it.’

The few components that comprise Kiarostami’s work feel like a refuge, from a world where, increasingly, everything is screaming for your attention in the brightest colours it can. The idea of art that runs away from you, that at different times depending on your conditions it can mean something different, an artwork that grows with you feels to me the true spirit of creation. So for that reason, Kiarostami is my inspiration. My hero.