TEHRAN – The Nations’ Diplomacy Think Tank, concurrently with the official launch of its Cultural Diplomacy Department, in collaboration with the Cinema Museum of Iran, is hosting a special ceremony to commemorate the late Abbas Kiarostami, the prominent filmmaker and enduring figure of Iranian culture and arts.

Titled “Abbas Kiarostami: Beyond Borders,” the event will take place on Thursday, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., in the Ferdows Hall of the Cinema Museum in Tehran, Honaronline reported.

During the discussion and tribute session, Ebrahim Haghighi, Seifollah Samadian, Seyed Mohammad Beheshti, and Shadmehr Rastin will attend as special guests to speak about various dimensions of Kiarostami’s artistic persona and cultural legacy.

This event will be held in the presence of a gathering of artists, filmmakers, as well as cultural and diplomatic figures.

Abbas Kiarostami (1940 – 2016) was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer. An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of over 40 films, including shorts and documentaries. 

Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the “Koker” trilogy (1987–1994), “Close-Up” (1990), “The Wind Will Carry Us” (1999), and “Taste of Cherry” (1997), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. 

In later works, “Certified Copy” (2010) and “Like Someone in Love” (2012), he filmed for the first time outside Iran: in Italy and Japan, respectively. 

His films “Where Is the Friend's House?” (1987), “Close-Up,” and “The Wind Will Carry Us” were ranked among the 100 best foreign films in a 2018 critics' poll by BBC Culture. “Close-Up” was also ranked one of the 50 greatest movies of all time in the famous decennial Sight & Sound poll conducted in 2012. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of Iran, and of all time.

Kiarostami had worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, art director, and producer and had designed credit titles and publicity material. He was also a poet, photographer, painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. He was part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and emphasized the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues.

Kiarostami had a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary-style narrative films, for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras. He is also known for his use of Persian poetry in the dialogue, titles, and themes of his films. Kiarostami's films contain a notable degree of ambiguity, an unusual mixture of simplicity and complexity, and often a mix of fictional and documentary elements. The concepts of change and continuity, in addition to the themes of life and death, play a major role in Kiarostami's works.

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