
Directing
Abbas Kiarostami
Born — Died
1940-06-22 — 2016-07-04
Place of birth
Tehran, Iran
Known for
Directing
Credits
87 titles
Abbas Kiarostami (Persian: عباس کیارستمی [ʔæbˌbɒːs kijɒːɾostæˈmi] ; June 22, 1940 – July 4, 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 forty 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 fi…
Known for
7.4When the actor in a scene for his film Life And Nothing More… has to quit, a film director casts another man for the part. However, complications arise since the man and the woman who was cast for the scene know each other.
Through the Olive Trees
1994
7.0In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged English writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano.
Certified Copy
2010
7.7A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.
Taste of Cherry
1997
6.440 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes.
Lumière & Company
1995
5.0Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Venice 70: Future Reloaded
2013
7.0Pizza man Hussein is a daily witnesses to the unjust distribution of wealth in his native Iran. One day, he finds a purse filled with shockingly expensive receipts from an upscale jewelry store. He attempts to bring the purse back to the store, but because of his working-class attire, he's not allowed inside. Then, during a delivery, a rich man invites Hussein into his extravagant mansion – an event that spurs Hussein to make a desperate bid for wealth.
Crimson Gold
2003
Film credits
2020s · 5 titles
NRFor 25 years, Samadian traveled with Kiarostami and recorded their journeys. He now turns that footage into a film in the spirit of Kiarostami's own films, arranging within it the secret keys to the beauty and mystery of his films. Ten stories, ten journeys unfold, using the ‘car’ and the ‘road’ as motifs. What does it mean to be on the road with Kiarostami?
On the Road with Abbas Kiarostami
2026
NRAli Dehbashi, the editor-in-chief of Bukhara Magazine, is forced to vacate his rented office. While struggling with asthma and the pressure of publishing a special issue dedicated to Ferdowsi, he continues to honor artists and visit ailing cultural figures. Homeless and unwell, his devotion to Iran’s literary legacy keeps him going.
Bukhara Chronicles
2025
NRLeeches a film by bahman kiarostami
Leech
2021
NR“Nature, the inexhaustible resource of encounters worthy of speechless communication,” declares Abbas Kiarostami in Fergus Daly’s beautiful journey. How can cinema free itself of its anthropocentric and industrial determinations? Each of the films presented here offers a solution, be it iconographic or technical, whether it involves renewing a representation or producing one’s own film reels, dancing with one’s whole body with nature as one’s partner or imagining a sound as animals might perceive it.
The Mirror of Possible Worlds: Kiarostami on Aran
2020
No synopsis available yet.
Volte Sempre, Abbas!
2026
2010s · 12 titles
5.8Eleven major film makers from Europe, America and Asia talk about Akira Kurosawa and discover surprising influences on their own work.
Kurosawa's Way
2011
6.0Filmmaker José Luis Guerin documents his experience during a year of traveling as a guest of film festivals to present his previous film. What emerges is a wonderfully humane and sincere portrayal of the people that he meets when he goes off the beaten track in some of the world's major cities.
Guest
2011
6.4Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.
What Is Cinema?
2013
NRAcclaimed Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami, delivers a film workshop in Bogotá, the filmmakers conclude by proposing a short film in 10 days. Diego, one of the directors of the workshop, as scouting, meets a young shy librarian named Vida , who dreams of being an actress.
Vida
2014
4.8A look at the formation of the career of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
Abbas Kiarostami: A Report
2013
NRDocumentary with behind-the-scenes footage on the set of Abbas Kiarostomi's 2012 film "Like Someone in Love" with narration by the director.
Making of 'Like Someone in Love'
2012
6.8Kiarostami as we have never really known him before, despite the transformative power of his many movies. Filmmaker and close friend Samadian avoids the talking heads of so many artistic memoirs to offer more candid clips of Kiarostami the man: lover of poetry, convivial with friends, engaging landscapes on and off screen, laughing with other artists. The artist and visionary emerges more clearly but so does a loving, wondrous man whom we will miss now as much as the auteur.
76 Minutes and 15 seconds with Abbas Kiarostami
2016
NRA behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of Abbas Kiarostami’s "Certified Copy" (2010).
Let's See Copia Conforme
2010
4.0Onstage interview with filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and Richard Richard Peña
The Poetry of Cinema: Abbas Kiarostami in Conversation with Richard Peña
2014
NRA short documentary from footage of the making of Kiarostami's 2017 film 24 FRAMES.
2019
NRThis interview-based documentary is made on the occasion of the 70th birthday of Aydin Aghdashloo, Mohammad Ehsaei and Abbas Kiarostami, and deals with "aging" from the point of view of these three prominent friends and artists.
In Praise of the Seventy Years Old
2010
NRYou Are Not Alone weaves together fragments of Taste of Cherry, Project, and footage from Abbas Kiarostami’s gravesite, reflecting on memory, mourning, and the enduring mystery of his absence.
You are not alone
2017
2000s · 17 titles
3.010 Days with Kiarostami
10 Days with Kiarostami
2005
6.0This documentary is featured on the two-disc Chaplin Collection DVD for "The Kid" (1921), released in 2004.
Chaplin Today: The Kid
2003
5.6U.S.-based film professor Jamsheed Akrami talks to Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami in an inpromptu video interview, which offers a frank and funny view of Kiarostami rarely seen before.
A Walk with Kiarostami
2003
NRA documentary that focuses on Abbas Kiarostami's cinematic philosophy talking to himself and other figures, and also seeks the opinion about his works both inside and outside his homeland.
Kiarostami in Close up
2000
10.0An Iranian filmmaker, a female taxi driver and a class a about cinema.
TropiAbbas
2005
NRAbbas Kiarostami on his film Five Dedicated to Ozu.
Around Five
2005
4.8Abbas Kiarostami shoots a documentary about the AIDS crisis in Uganda.
ABC Africa
2001
7.5Relationships and multiple influences between two great directors of modern cinema.
Víctor Erice – Abbas Kiarostami: Correspondences
2007
NRAbbas Kiarostami is the most acclaimed Iranian film director whose films have won prizes all around the world. In this film he gives a rare and frank interview about his work, and journeys out of Tehran to meet Babk Ahmadpoor the now grown up star of his famous trilogy which started with Where is the Friends House. On the journey Kiarostami picks up the camera himself, producing images of pure poetry.
On the Road with Kiarostami
2005
5.0A documentary dealing with the life of Ahmadreza Ahmadi, an Iranian Poet.
A Good Time for Tragedy
2005
NRAbbas Kiarostami about the making of "The Wind Will Carry Us"
Abbas Kiarostami: Leçon de cinéma
2002
6.3"10 on Ten" is a 2004 Iranian documentary film directed by Abbas Kiarostami. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Looking to his own art for inspiration, Abbas Kiarostami reflects on his techniques of filming and how he taped certain sequences in "Ten" in 2001.
10 on Ten
2004
7.0Through an interview with Kiarostami in the Aran Islands and interviews with film critics and scholars at Cannes, the director examines Kiarostami's themes and methods. The director also profiles Kiarostami as a poet and a photographer.
Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living
2003
No synopsis available yet.
Abbas Kiarostami commente son film
2001
NRA short documentary about the making of Abbas Kiarostami's 'Shirin'.
Taste of Shirin
2008
5.0Twenty years after The Traveler was made, Kiarostami's son filmed his father as he reunited with the film's child star, now in his 30s.
Journey to the Land of the Traveler
2004
6.0Static shots of his photos alternate with footage of director Abbas Kiarostami's car winding through mountain roads, as the Iranian filmmaker muses in voice-over on the significance of the journey and on the path of his work and Persian literature as a whole.
Roads of Kiarostami
2006
1990s · 10 titles
7.4When the actor in a scene for his film Life And Nothing More… has to quit, a film director casts another man for the part. However, complications arise since the man and the woman who was cast for the scene know each other.
Through the Olive Trees
1994
7.7A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.
Taste of Cherry
1997
8.0This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
Close-Up
1990
NRA documentary by Hamideh Sharif Rad about Abbas Kiarostami's "Through the Olive Trees" (1994).
Behind the Scenes of 'Under the Olive Trees'
1994
7.0A documentary about Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami first aired on the French television series Cinema de Notre Temps.
Abbas Kiarostami: Truths and Dreams
1994
7.7A documentary about the most important modern Iranian poet and intellectual icon. Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou talks about his poetry, the world of poetry, and his life. Filmed over a two year period from 1996 to 1998.
Ahmad Shamlou: Master Poet of Liberty
1999
6.4Hossain Sabzian and some of his associates discuss his character, his life-long obsession with cinema and his attitude towards the film he starred in, "Close-Up" (1990).
Close-Up Long Shot
1996
No synopsis available yet.
Sohanak
1997
NRMohara Yuji's documentary A Week with Kiarostami, filmed on the set of The Wind Will Carry Us. A photographic diary, the film plunges us into the beating heart of a shoot whose story plays out to the rhythm of the relationships between actors and local people. A team led by Yuji Mohara traveled to Iran to a portrait of the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostam. Mohara met Kiarostami in a village on the set of Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us. A Week with Kiarostami is a cinematic diary of the set, and opened the door to the world of this poetic and mysterious director. Seven days which allow us to this corner of Iran to discover, and the way in which Kiarostami these dreams; seven chronicles we do pay up in the beating heart of a rotation whose story the rhythm of the relationships between the actors and villagers follows.
A Week With Kiarostami
1999
7.5A thirty-nine minute sketch film for TASTE OF CHERRY that Abbas Kiarostani made with his son Bahman Kiarostami.
Project
1997
1980s · 1 titles
Series credits
Behind the camera
7.4When the actor in a scene for his film Life And Nothing More… has to quit, a film director casts another man for the part. However, complications arise since the man and the woman who was cast for the scene know each other.
Through the Olive Trees
1994
7.4When the actor in a scene for his film Life And Nothing More… has to quit, a film director casts another man for the part. However, complications arise since the man and the woman who was cast for the scene know each other.
Through the Olive Trees
1994
7.4When the actor in a scene for his film Life And Nothing More… has to quit, a film director casts another man for the part. However, complications arise since the man and the woman who was cast for the scene know each other.
Through the Olive Trees
1994
7.0In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged English writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano.
Certified Copy
2010
7.0In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged English writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano.
Certified Copy
2010
7.7A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.
Taste of Cherry
1997
7.7A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.
Taste of Cherry
1997
7.7A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.
Taste of Cherry
1997
6.440 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes.
Lumière & Company
1995
5.0Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Venice 70: Future Reloaded
2013
7.0Pizza man Hussein is a daily witnesses to the unjust distribution of wealth in his native Iran. One day, he finds a purse filled with shockingly expensive receipts from an upscale jewelry store. He attempts to bring the purse back to the store, but because of his working-class attire, he's not allowed inside. Then, during a delivery, a rich man invites Hussein into his extravagant mansion – an event that spurs Hussein to make a desperate bid for wealth.
Crimson Gold
2003
6.9An old man and a young woman meet in Tokyo. She knows nothing about him, he thinks he knows her. He welcomes her into his home, she offers him her body. But the web that is woven between them in the space of twenty four hours bears no relation to the circumstances of their encounter.
Like Someone in Love
2012
6.9An old man and a young woman meet in Tokyo. She knows nothing about him, he thinks he knows her. He welcomes her into his home, she offers him her body. But the web that is woven between them in the space of twenty four hours bears no relation to the circumstances of their encounter.
Like Someone in Love
2012
7.9An 8-year-old boy must return his friend's notebook he took by mistake, lest his friend be punished by expulsion from school.
Where Is The Friend's House?
1987
7.9An 8-year-old boy must return his friend's notebook he took by mistake, lest his friend be punished by expulsion from school.
Where Is The Friend's House?
1987
8.0This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
Close-Up
1990
8.0This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
Close-Up
1990
6.4Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.
To Each His Own Cinema
2007
7.1Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.
The Wind Will Carry Us
1999
7.1Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.
The Wind Will Carry Us
1999
7.1Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.
The Wind Will Carry Us
1999
7.7After the earthquake of Guilan, a film director and his son travel to the devastated area to search for the actors from the movie the director made there a few years previously. In their search, they see how people who have lost everything in the earthquake still have hope and try to live life to the fullest.
Life, and Nothing More…
1992
7.7After the earthquake of Guilan, a film director and his son travel to the devastated area to search for the actors from the movie the director made there a few years previously. In their search, they see how people who have lost everything in the earthquake still have hope and try to live life to the fullest.
Life, and Nothing More…
1992
6.5A collection of 24 short four-and-a-half minutes films inspired by still images, including paintings and photographs. An experimental project made by filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami in the last three years of his life.
24 Frames
2018
7.5Several people try to take advantage of a little girl's innocence to hustle money her mom gave to her to buy a goldfish with.
The White Balloon
1995
7.2A woman orders a suit from a tailor for her young son to wear to her sister's wedding. The tailor's apprentice, together with two other teenage boys who work in the same building, devise a plan to try on the suit at night to see what it feels like.
A Wedding Suit
1976
7.2A woman orders a suit from a tailor for her young son to wear to her sister's wedding. The tailor's apprentice, together with two other teenage boys who work in the same building, devise a plan to try on the suit at night to see what it feels like.
A Wedding Suit
1976
7.2A woman orders a suit from a tailor for her young son to wear to her sister's wedding. The tailor's apprentice, together with two other teenage boys who work in the same building, devise a plan to try on the suit at night to see what it feels like.
A Wedding Suit
1976
6.4A train travels across Italy toward Rome. Onboard is a professor who daydreams a conversation with a love that never was; a family of Albanian refugees who switch trains and steal a ticket; three brash Scottish soccer fans en route to a match; and a complaining widow travelling to a memorial service for her late husband who's accompanied by a community-service volunteer who's assisting her. Interactions among these Europeans turn on class and nationalism, courtesy and decorum, and opportunities for kindness.
Tickets
2005
6.4A train travels across Italy toward Rome. Onboard is a professor who daydreams a conversation with a love that never was; a family of Albanian refugees who switch trains and steal a ticket; three brash Scottish soccer fans en route to a match; and a complaining widow travelling to a memorial service for her late husband who's accompanied by a community-service volunteer who's assisting her. Interactions among these Europeans turn on class and nationalism, courtesy and decorum, and opportunities for kindness.
Tickets
2005
7.3A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.
Ten
2002
5.6Anthology of short films about the French city of Nice, by various directors. A homage to Jean Vigo and his "À propos de Nice" from 1930.
Concerning Nice
1995
5.6Anthology of short films about the French city of Nice, by various directors. A homage to Jean Vigo and his "À propos de Nice" from 1930.
Concerning Nice
1995
5.9Finding himself in a house in the north of Iran by the Caspian Sea, the director picked up his handheld DV camera and began filming the seemingly anodyne events happening on the 500 metres of beach in front of his house—a piece of wood toyed with by the waves, people walking by the sea, indistinct shapes on a wintry beach or noisy ducks.
Five Dedicated to Ozu
2003
5.9Finding himself in a house in the north of Iran by the Caspian Sea, the director picked up his handheld DV camera and began filming the seemingly anodyne events happening on the 500 metres of beach in front of his house—a piece of wood toyed with by the waves, people walking by the sea, indistinct shapes on a wintry beach or noisy ducks.
Five Dedicated to Ozu
2003
6.2A hundred and fourteen famous Iranian theater and cinema actresses and a French star: mute spectators at a theatrical representation of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian poem from the twelfth century, put on stage by Kiarostami. The development of the text -- long a favorite in Persia and the Middle East -- remains invisible to the viewer of the film, the whole story is told by the faces of the women watching the show.
Shirin
2009
6.2A hundred and fourteen famous Iranian theater and cinema actresses and a French star: mute spectators at a theatrical representation of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian poem from the twelfth century, put on stage by Kiarostami. The development of the text -- long a favorite in Persia and the Middle East -- remains invisible to the viewer of the film, the whole story is told by the faces of the women watching the show.
Shirin
2009
7.2Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral 10-year-old boy in a small Iranian town wishes to see the Iran national football team play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors.
The Traveler
1974
7.2Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral 10-year-old boy in a small Iranian town wishes to see the Iran national football team play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors.
The Traveler
1974
7.2Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral 10-year-old boy in a small Iranian town wishes to see the Iran national football team play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors.
The Traveler
1974


