About Kiarostami

[Rasputin]

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has been named by Martin Scorsese as a member of the advisory board to launch a foundation for world cinema.

Scorsese announced the creation of a foundation that would locate and restore neglected treasures of world cinema during an appearance Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival, according to AP.

The Academy Award-winning director is also backed up by other prominent international directors in the venture including Mexico's Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, China's Wong Kar-wai and Britain's Stephen Frears.

The idea stemmed from the work of the Film Foundation in the US, which Scorsese founded in 1990 along with Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg.

Born in 1940 in Tehran, Abbas Kiarostami began his career as a graphic designer after completing a university degree in fine arts. He then joined the Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, where he later started a film section, thus embarking a career in filmmaking at the age of 30.

Kiarostami has been involved in over 40 films, including many short films and documentaries, although he is perhaps best known for his films The Koker trilogy (1987-1994), A Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).

Other than directing films, he has also worked extensively in various tasks in his own films and others, including script writing, editing, art direction and film production and design.

Kiarostami has received numerous awards including the A***a Kurosawa Award (2000), the Konrad Wolf Prize (2003) and the Prix Henri Langlois Prize (2006).

Kiarostami's ABC Africa was commissioned by the UN International Fund for Economic Development. The film aimed to document the plight of millions of Ugandan orphans ravaged by the civil war and the scourge of AIDS.

The work was reviewed at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival last April in the US.



On the 7th day at the Cannes film festival, Hollywood director Martin Scorsese announced that he would head a foundation to find and restore neglected world films.

The Academy Award winning director stated that the project aimed at finding and reconstructing world cinema films that have been long neglected.

He said celebrated international directors would help him as advisors in the project.

He named the internationally acclaimed Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami as one his counselors in the World Cinema Foundation.

Also Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu from Mexico, Stephen Fraser from Britain, Guillermo delToro from Spain, Fatih Akin from Germany and other great directors that will help Scorsese in the project.

The World Cinema Foundation was inspired by the work of the Film Foundation in the United States, a similar venture which Scorsese founded with George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood in 1990.

At this year's edition of Cannes festival, the foundation is presenting three restored films from Morocco, Brazil and Romania dating as far back as 1931.

These are the first films represented by the foundation.

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

On the 7th day at the Cannes film festival, Hollywood director Martin Scorsese announced that he would head a foundation to find and restore neglected world films.

The Academy Award winning director stated that the project aimed at finding and reconstructing world cinema films that have been long neglected.

He said celebrated international directors would help him as advisors in the project.

He named the internationally acclaimed Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami as one his counselors in the World Cinema Foundation.

Also Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu from Mexico, Stephen Fraser from Britain, Guillermo delToro from Spain, Fatih Akin from Germany and other great directors that will help Scorsese in the project.

The World Cinema Foundation was inspired by the work of the Film Foundation in the United States, a similar venture which Scorsese founded with George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood in 1990.

At this year's edition of Cannes festival, the foundation is presenting three restored films from Morocco, Brazil and Romania dating as far back as 1931.

These are the first films represented by the foundation.

[donsaeid]

wow! great for persian cinema

[Rasputin]

Iranian director's work from cinema to photos on display in Berkeley retrospective ex

In a critics' poll taken a few years ago by Sight & Sound magazine, Abbas Kiarostami was ranked the fourth most important filmmaker of modern times -- behind Wong Kar-Wai (No. 3), Krzysztof Kieslowski (No. 2) and Martin Scorsese. Asked about Kiarostami, Scorsese once said, "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema."

Artistry, yes. Politics, no. Even though he's from Iran (where politics is omnipresent), even though Iranian authorities have for a decade banned his films from screening there, and even though Kiarostami would have good reason to skewer Tehran's repressive political establishment, he never does -- at least not overtly.

"I don't think there can be any work of art or film that's not political in some sense," Kiarostami says in a phone interview from Tehran, speaking in Persian that is then translated. "The more a film stays away from explicit political statements, the more political it can actually become. When a film is concerned with human beings, and social situations, and social conditions, it is inadvertently, automatically, a political film."

A major Kiarostami retrospective opened two days ago at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where visitors can see all facets of the director's work -- including his early films from the 1970s and his new photographic series that feature roadways and landscapes framed by rain-splashed windshields. It's Kiarostami at his best -- a man with an ability to turn simple scenes into profound canvases of beauty, chaos and poetry.

Humor is also evident in Kiarostami's canvases, even though this comic side often gets overlooked in the wider scope of his work. For example, Kiarostami embeds "The Wind Will Carry Us" (screening Aug. 30 at the PFA) with moments of dark humor, such as the scene where the main character -- a Kiarostami-like photographer from Tehran -- sits in a village cafe and tells an older, strong-minded waitress, "I've never seen a woman serve before."

"You have parents, don't you?" the waitress asks him. "Who served your father his tea?"

"My mother," the character admits.

In Kiarostami's films, characters constantly face bite-size challenges to their forwardness. Whether or not they fail the tests (at one point, the Kiarostami look-alike in "Wind" helps a schoolboy cheat on his exam), their confrontations with themselves -- what might be called their existential dilemmas -- are on full view, without dramatic sets, music or other cinematic cues.

Kiarostami's less-is-more approach is reminiscent of Italian neorealism. Nonprofessional actors always populate Kiarostami's movies, which are also notable for scenes where the camera lingers on a character even as he (or she) listens to other characters speak out of frame. Some of these characters are never seen. In a Kiarostami movie, narrative details fill in gradually.

"One of the things I really enjoy about his films is that ... there's so much that isn't shown or isn't known," says Kathy Geritz, a curator at the Pacific Film Archive. "We're often in a scene without knowing fully what the action is, but sounds give us clues, dialogue later on reflectively gives us clues. In 'The Wind Will Carry Us,' a person is on a journey to go to a town to do something, and we're never fully sure what that was. So a lot of (enjoying a Kiarostami film) is observing, and thinking, and making connections, but not necessarily knowing. I like that uncertainty and open-endedness."

Loved in the West, Kiarostami is loathed by Iran's film censors because, he theorizes, they think his films have hidden, subversive messages. It's true that Kiarostami confronts subjects that are taboo by Iran's conservative religious standards. In 1997's "Taste of Cherry," which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes (it shared the award with Shohei Imamura's "The Eel"), a man drives around Tehran looking to pick up a stranger who will help him commit suicide. (Suicide is forbidden by Islamic doctrine.)

In 2002's "Ten," Kiarostami showcases a series of women -- including a prostitute -- who talk about intimate relations with men and about Iran's overbearing legal system. In "Wind" from 1999, a character uses the words of Omar Khayyam -- one of Persia's most famous poets -- to dismiss those who say the afterlife will be as beautiful and worthwhile as the here-and-now. The scene could be interpreted as challenging the martyrdom that was advocated by Iran's revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, though Kiarostami says audiences should draw their own conclusions from his films -- and his photographs, which have no obvious political bent.

The four series of photos at the Berkeley Art Museum are all centered on nature. Besides the "Rain" series, there are series on snow and trees ("Snow White"), roads and trees, and crows and trees. Kiarostami, who's also a published poet, took some of these images while scouting for movie locations. The "Snow White" and "Rain" photos are stunning in the ways they capture the curves, splotches and starkness of inclement conditions. In several images, trees cut through the snow like the jagged lines of a Franz Kline painting. Drops on windshields look like splashes from the hand of Jackson Pollock.

At first, Kiarostami didn't intend to take photos, let alone exhibit them.

"When I went into nature, the beauty and sublimity of what I encountered was too unbearable to leave alone," says Kiarostami, whose retrospective completed a New York run before coming to Berkeley. "I bought a camera and started taking pictures. I always stored the pictures in a box, not intending to show them publicly. But 10 to 15 years ago, I decided to exhibit them."

Where Kiarostami once surrounded himself with large movie crews, he now prefers to shoot photos by himself or to make movies with a small crew and digital cameras, as he did with the 2001 documentary "ABC Africa" (which is about Uganda's children orphaned by AIDS).

Kiarostami is set to make another film outside Iran -- this one an Italian story set in Italy that stars a French actress and an American actor. Kiarostami wouldn't name the actor, saying the contract hasn't officially been signed yet. Kiarostami will say that "he is one of America's significant actors," and that he met him through Scorsese, with whom Kiarostami has a deep friendship.

By using an actor from the United States, and embarking on an Iranian-U.S.-European production, Kiarostami may be making a statement about the state of politics in and outside of Iran.

As Kiarostami says during the interview from Tehran, "No Iranian citizen has any problems with any American citizen, and vice versa. Whatever animosity and tension exists is between the authorities. I hope cultural exchange does not become influenced by the political situation. I see our situation similar to little kids playing under an apartment in the yard, while the grown-ups are having their own fight inside the apartment. "

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

At the Berkeley Art Museum a fan blew at one Kiarostami 'photograph.' The rest of his works remained still--like the audience in a theater-- while this projected video of branches and leaves apparently swayed in the turbulence created by the fan. The famed film director had broadened me forever with awareness of the very air between the projector and the screen. Beware, those who would walk blithely into Abbas Kiarostami’s mind, the door you entered through will be too small to let you back out.

I was late for a rendez-vous with friends to see some of Kiarostami’s early films being shown across the street, so I hurried past his photographs of trees in the snow, promising to return while their winter still hung on the walls.

“I have a ticket waiting for me,” I announced at the will-call booth.

“Excuse me, sir,” came an irked voice from behind me, “but there’s a line here?”

How did I miss seeing all the people in the queue, when my eyes could now see invisible air? 'Sorry ma’m,” I said to her. And almost confided, “I thought I was ignoring a row of trees planted in the snow.” Beware!


Kiarostami looked on with amusement as I trudged to the back of line. Not Abbas, but his son Ahmad, who had labored to make the event happen. He welcomed us, then sat one row behind us with a couple of his artist friends. We chatted each other up with such good natured Iranian cinema banter that I nostalgically wished I had brought some pistachios and So Can I, released when Abbas was in his mid thirties, already predicts the future authority of his signature seal of humor. In this cartoon short, a child realizes he can ludicrously jump like a kangaroo, laughably crawl like a worm, and passably swim like a fish. But when he ponders whether he can fly like a bird, he is stumped. As adults we laugh at the child’s charming dilemma, but how many times have we been confronted with the tragedy of human limitations? How many times have we wept helplessly as death took away a loved one? The film ends with a magnificent shot of a jet plane taking off, engines screaming louder than thirty simorghs.


Decades later, in The Wind Will Carry Us, Abbas’ formidable flight of humorous intellect challenged the tragic limitations of Iran’s censorship laws. Juxtaposing the simple milking of a cow with a sensuous Farrokhzaad love poem, he dared the pious censors to make the dirty-minded connection to ejaculation, putting them in a damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don’t checkmate.


It is unwise, however, to be too confident of having discovered the elements of Kiarostami’s craft. post-Darwinian-psychology, not the boy and his medieval predicament. Checkmate!

Therefore, I feel wary of the grandmaster as I critique the last work in that day’s Kiarostami lineup, a filmmaking masterpiece called The Traveler.

Released five years before Iran’s Islamic Republic came to power, The Traveler has turned out to be an oracular study of fanatic passion. The plot revolves around Ghassem, a poor teenager from the small town of Malayer. He worships the seventies’ national soccer hero, Ghelichkhani. In his resolve to make a pilgrimage to Tehran’s Amjadieh soccer stadium he balks at nothing, however unethical, to come up with his ticket and travel money.
Kiarostami makes us laugh when the resourceful boy goes around with a filmless camera conning his vain but destitute classmates into paying for portraits. Later, we watch more soberly as Ghassem secretly sells his own soccer team’s equipment to the rival team. We discovered the boy’s frightening zeal earlier when he endures torture at the hands of his headmaster rather than give up the few Tomans stolen from his own mother. For Ghassem, the soccer match in Tehran is not just a teenage dream, it is the heartless stuff of religious fanaticism. It is not just an ambition of admirable intensity, it is a quest for fulfillment of spiritual lust. The aesthetic allure of his purpose transcends friendship, compassion, love, all the gentle elements of human morality.





There are scenes in which the mother blames the father, and the headmaster blames the mother for not intervening early enough. But their powerless mannerisms show clearly that no one is a match for Ghassem’s innate single-mindedness.


Yet, like a nature film on the Discovery channel, Kiarostami makes us root for this beautiful natural predator. We adore scruffy little Ghassem for his precocious determination. We sigh at his disappointments and cheer as he emerges triumphant after each crisis. From the film’s view, Ghassem’s opponent is not the society he victimizes, but the Universe that gave him desire without the means. Posed in this way, it is impossible not to give heart and soul to the boy who commands into the Void, “let there be justice for me.” The rest of humanity queued up to receive their rights, might as well be a row of trees planted in the snow.


Relentlessly raising the stakes, Kiarostami now embarrasses us in our willingness to be led astray. In an ironic scene, Ghassem is victimized by his future self. The stadium ticket office runs out just before our hero’s turn to finally buy his passage to the game. A scalper--who is responsible for the shortage--makes the desperate boy pay four times as much for that ticket. Just what Ghassem will do when he grows up. We thought we were thick as thieves with Abbas, giving our approving wink to Ghassem’s machinations. It turns out the director was putting us to the test all along. Beware!


Kiarostami’s devastating critique of our sense of fairness falters, however, in the scenes just before the final shot. He knows something important is still left unsaid. Redemption is the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that an artist from a Christian culture may have snapped into place. But for Kiarostami redemption is not a jigsaw piece, it is a chess piece. The black and white squares of morality are just the background to vastly more complex subtleties.


Sidestepping a naive resolution in salvation, the young Kiarostami clumsily twists the plot towards retribution. Ghassem inexplicably falls asleep just before the soccer match begins, missing union with his divine. A dream sequence suggesting the weight of subconscious guilt felled our hero is uncharacteristically heavy handed. The sudden transmutation of Ghassem’s mettle seems beneath Kiarostami’s savvy. Is the director still taunting us towards a better understanding of ourselves? Or was this just a blunder by a young director with a small budget for editing and rewrites?

Fortunately, The Traveler is a still portrait of Ghassem, it is not his story. As in some other Kiarostami photographs presented in motion picture format, what evolves is the viewer, not the image. The story is in the frustrations he leaves behind that continue to add reels in our minds. What will happen to the heartbroken Ghassem now that he is marooned penniless in a metropolis? Will he fall prey to his own kind? If he outsmarts them, will he grow up to be an unscrupulous leader who would lie to mire his nation in unjust wars? Or by some rare transcendence, will he become a great director with sharper insight into right and wrong than those who have never grappled with passion and its dishonest ways?


After the show, we stepped out to happier frustrations. The restaurant we like gets booked up at night. Chopin’s #20 nocturne, was left unfinished on a friend’s piano from earlier in the day when we had to hurry for the theatre.


In between the sun and the night, Kiarostami’s still frames, and air.

[Rasputin]

رابرت دنيرو و هديه تهراني در فيلم جديد عباس كيارستمي

عباس كيارستمي كارگردان شاخص سينماي ايران در حال تلاش است تا براي ساخت فيلم جديد خود از رابرت دنيرو در يكي از نقش*ها استفاده كند.

در خبرهاي قبلي اشاره شده بود كه كيارستمي با «* ژوليت بينوش» بازيگر فرانسوي براي ايفاي يكي از نقش*هاي فيلم خود مذاكره كرده است. اين فيلم با نام « رونوشت برابر اصل» در ايران و يك شهر اروپايي مقابل دوربين خواهد رفت و كيارستمي تلاش*هاي زيادي را براي حضور رابرت دنيرو انجام داده است. اين فيلم اين روزها در مرحله پيش توليد قرار دارد و عوامل آن در حال انتخاب هستند. جالب است بدانيد هديه تهراني هم به احتمال زياد در اين فيلم به عنوان دستيار كارگردان حضور خواهد داشت. تهراني در سال*هاي اخير علاقه زيادي به حضور در كنار كارگردان*هاي هنري نشان داده و سال گذشته در فيلم بهمن قبادي هم ايفاي نقش كرده است.

[Rasputin]

جدیدترین فیلم کیارستمی در جشن هفته مستند



دو فیلم جدید از عباس کیارستمی در جشن هفته فیلم مستند که در خانه سینما برگزار می شود به نمایش در خواهد آمد.
"نامه ها" یکی از فیلم های جدید کیارستمی، گفت و گوی تصویری با اریس کریس کارگردان اسپانیایی است و پیش از این در موزه ژرژ پمپیدوی پاریس و همچنین در جشن تصویرهنرمند به نمایش گذاشته شده است، اما او یک فیلم هم در این جشن دارد که هنوز در هیچ جایی به نمایش در نیامده است.

این فیلم این روزها مراحل فنی خود را پشت سر می گذارد تا به جشن برسد که از روز هفتم آبان کار خود را با نمایش چند فیلم در خانه سینما آغاز می کند.

در این جشن فیلم های برگزیده بخش مستند جشن خانه سینما به اضافه فیلم هایی از فیلمسازان برجسته در بخش ویژه به نمایش در می آید.

مجید مجیدی با دو فیلم "المپیک در پکن" و "پا برهنه تا هرات"، رخشان بنی اعتماد با فیلم کوتاه ۱۰ دقیقه*ای "مشترک مورد نظر در دسترس نیست" از مجموعه فرش ایرانی، تهمینه میلا*نی هم با فیلم کوتاه "می*ترسم! پس دروغ می*گویم" که به سفارش یونیسف و در ۳۵ دقیقه ساخته است، دربخش ویژه این جشن حضور دارند.

بخشی از جشن نیز به جلسات نقد و گفت*وگو با حضور منتقدان سینمای مستند اختصاص می یابد که همایون امامی، روبرت صافاریان، شادمهر راستین و پیروز کلا*نتری از جمله منتقدان حاضر در این جشن خواهند بود .

گفتنی است در کنار این جشن، جشنواره سینما حقیقت، جشنواره فیلم کوتاه تهران و جشن تصویرهنرمند نیز امکان نمایش عمومی فیلم های مستند را فراهم می کنند.

دومین هفته فیلم مستند توسط انجمن مستندسازان سینمای ایران از ۷ تا ۱۱ آبان در خانه سینما برگزار می*شود.

[Rasputin]

Abbas Kiarostami will be directing an Opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart next July entitled 'Cosi fan tutte' aka Thus Do They All de Mozart for the 60th Annual of the International Festival of Lyrical Art in France’s d'Aix-en-Provence.



This new production will be performed 8 times between the 4th and 19th of July 2008 at the Théâtre de l'Archevêché. The Salzburg “Camerata” Orchestra will be conducted by French conductor Christophe Rousset.



It is co-produced with the help of the British National Opera (ENO) will also host the Opera later in the year after the July Premiere.



Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (aka Thus Do They All, or The School For Lovers) K. 588, is an opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto was written by Lorenzo da Ponte.


Così is one of the three Mozart operas for which da Ponte wrote the libretto. (The title is often shortened to Così in the English-speaking world.) The other two da Ponte-Mozart collaborations were Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni.



Cosi was written and composed at the suggestion of the Emperor Joseph II. The libretto was originally intended to be set to music by Mozart's contemporary Antonio Salieri but Salieri only completed parts of the first act and then broke off work on the opera.






The title, Così fan tutte, literally means 'Thus do all [women]' but it is often translated as 'Women are like that'. The words are sung by the three men in Act II, Scene xiii, just before the finale. Da Ponte had used the line 'Così fan tutte le belle' earlier in Le nozze di Figaro (in Act I, Scene vii).






The idea of staging the Opera was suggested to Kiarostami by Bernard Foccroulle the Belgian director of the Lyrical French Festival. Kiarostami told French presse news agency (AFP) that 'at the first meeting I said no, that I was not worthy. But then Bernard convinced me to accept the challenge... it's an immense pleasure and honor.'



He added “The more I got to learn about this Opera, the more I realized the universality of the themes in Mozart’s 'Cosi fan tutte'. In a sense as artists we all play music but with different instruments. Now that I experienced this change, I find that it is no different from directing a film. I want to thank Bernard (Foccroulle) for being instrumental in pushing me in this new direction despite.”.



Kiarostami will soon be directing his next feature film “Certified Copy” this March with French Star’s Juliette Binoche and Sami Frey to be shot in Tuscany.

[Rasputin]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSDWtdJKrG0"]YouTube - Kiarostami - Interview[/ame]

[Rasputin]

رسانه*ها و منتقدان سینمایی دنیا پس از نخستین نمایش "شیرین" عباس کیارستمی در جشنواره ونیز آن را با عبارت*های تحفه پیچیده، چرخش جالب در کارنامه فیلمسازی و آهسته*ترین فیلم کیارستمی توصیف کردند.
فیلم 92 دقیقه*ای و دیجیتال "شیرین" روز پنجشنبه در نخستین روز شصیت و پنجمین دوره جشنواره ونیز در بخش خارج از مسابقه به نمایش درآمد و واکنش*هایی متفاوت و گاه متضاد را در میان بینندگان، منتقدان اروپایی و آمریکایی و رسانه*های معتبر برانگیخت.

نیل اسمیت گزارشگر شبکه خبری BBC در لیدو ونیز درباره تجربه تماشای "شیرین" کیارستمی نوشت: تصویر جالب ژولیت بینوش با یک روسری بر سر تنها چیزی است که من از این فیلم با خود خواهم برد. "شیرین" شامل تصاویر نمای نزدیک واکنش زنان مسلمان به فیلمی است که ما فقط آن را می*شنویم. این تحفه پیچیده، مینی*مالیسم را به یک سطح کاملا تازه می*رساند.



گرچه به عقیده وی این "تجربه تلخ" به مذاق عده*ای خوش نیامد و سالن را ترک کردند. اندرو پولور از گاردین هم معتقد است کیارستمی در سال*های حضور در سینما به تدریج از فیلمسازی فاصله گرفته و در چند تجربه اخیر بیشتر به یک هنرمند اینستالیشن شبیه بوده تا فیلمساز... عجیب*ترین نکته این فیلم عجیب و فریبنده هم شباهت یکی از زنان بازیگر به بینوش است!

دبورا یانگ منتقد نشریه هالیوود ریپورتر هم تجربه تماشای "شیرین" را اینگونه توصیف کرده است: یک چرخش جالب توجه دیگر در کارنامه فیلمسازی کیارستمی... فیلم تصویری ساده از نمای نزدیک 113 بازیگر ایرانی است که بسیار به تجربه اخیر وی "تعزیه" شباهت دارد تا فیلم*هایی چون "طعم گیلاس" و "باد ما را خواهد برد".

منتقد نشریه ورایتی هم می*نویسد: چهره زنان در "شیرین" در مقایسه با فیلم مینی*مالیستی "پنج" یک داستان تاثیرگذار می*گوید که روایتی نادیده را غیرمستقیم تفهیم یا بازسازی می*کند... جولیت بینوش بدون کمترین آرایش و در حالی که سر خود را با یک روسری معمولی پوشانده است، تقریبا ایرانی*تر از تمام ایرانی*های فیلم به نظر می*رسد.

نویسنده ایرانی سایت خبری بلومبرگ نیز "شیرین" عباس کیارستمی را دیده و آن را "آهسته*ترین فیلم وی" توصیف کرده است. منتقد بلومبرگ به "شیرین" دو ستاره و نیم داده و نوشته است: فیلم ادای دین کیارستمی به جمعیت سینمارو و نتیجه پایانی آن پیروزی فرم بر محتوا و وسیله بر هدف است.

[Rasputin]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2003/nov/14/1

[Rasputin]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/2009/05/090505_si_kiarostami_opera.shtml

[Rasputin]