On October, we are showing films on arsenal 3 that put a spotlight on Abbas Kiarostami and his filmmaking. The program is supplemented by video messages and introductions that will also be shown in the cinema before individual films. Amir Naderi, Jafar Panahi, Mahmood Kalari, Seifollah Samadian, Leila Hatami, Taranhe Aidoosti, Kanako Hayashi, and Asghar Farhadi – colleagues, collaborators, actors – all give accounts of their relationship to Kiarostami’s films.
BÄRBEL ERZÄHLT EINEN FILM (Karl Heil, Germany 2005) “A woman sits on a tree trunk and looks at a lake, with her back to the camera. As she recalls several key scenes from Abbas Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry, her enthusiasm comes across clearly as she turns her face towards the audience. We hear the quiet rush of the water and the intense impression left behind what she’s narrating from memory. Silence follows the end of the account, as she turns back to the lake.” (Karl Heil)
HAMRAH BA BAAD (Walking with the Wind, Mehdi Shadizadeh, Iran 2019) This documentary about Abbas Kiarostami doesn’t just show him as a filmmaker, but also as a more wide-ranging artist, to whose forms of expression poetry, photography, and graphic design also belong. A series of contemporaries who are also active in different artistic disciplines remember Kiarostami.
PAZIRAIE SADEH (Modest Reception, Mani Haghighi, Iran 2012) A man whose arm in a plaster cast is reminiscent of Napoleon and a well-dressed woman drive through a mountain region marked by war. In the trunk, they have plastic bags full of money that they hand out to the poor people whose paths they cross. Are the pair really on a charitable mission or is this some sort of perverse game of seduction and morals? In Men at Work (which we are showing in the cinema as part of the Abbas Kiarostami retrospective), Mani Haghighi already took the sort of social critique expected of Iranian cinema to absurd lengths. With both films, Mani Haghighi gave the genre of the Iranian road movie a new direction.
