The Fifty Best Living Directors

18. Abbas Kiarostami
Born: 1940, Tehran, Iran
Crowning Achievement: Taste of Cherry (1997)
The most poetic of Iran’s directors, Abbas Kiarostami won the Cannes Palme d’Or for his austere 1997 film Taste of Cherry, shifting the world’s focus to the stark, neo-realistic cinema of post-revolutionary Iran. In Kiarostami’s claustrophobic Ten, our gaze remains stuck on the woman driver and any number of her passengers as the agitated conversations touch upon the plight of Iranian women, as so many of the best Iranian filmmakers have done. Through the Olive Trees uses long takes and silences to map the emotional terrain of his female lead. But Kiarostami’s concerns extend beyond the feminine, to questions of mortality, justice and the mystery of life. These riddles lie at the heart of his greatest works.

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