The film-maker is renowned as an artist who stayed in Iran after the Islamic revolution of 1979, when others fled abroad. As his new film premieres in Edinburgh, he talks to Maya Jaggi
Abbas Kiarostami was about to celebrate his 50th birthday when the earthquake of 1990 hit northern Iran. He drove with his son from the capital, Tehran, to the devastated region, where he had recently filmed Where Is the Friend's House?, an acutely observed moral tale about a boy striving to return an exercise book to a classmate to save him from punishment. The feature won him acclaim at the Locarno film festival in 1989. "Travelling in the area touched me deeply," he says. "I had such a close and profound experience of death that it changed my work in an optimistic way."
After completing And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, two more films set around the earthquake-devastated village of Koker which, together, are often seen as his masterpiece, in 1997 he made Taste of Cherry, in which a man determined to commit suicide drives around the outskirts of Tehran trying to persuade someone to bury him. When the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997 it crested a wave of recognition for Iranian cinema, and earned him opprobrium among conservatives at home for kissing a woman - Catherine Deneuve - who was not his wife at the ceremony.
Now 68, Kiarostami has made more than 40 films in Iran in as many years. He is renowned as an artist who stayed in the country after the Islamic revolution of 1979, when others fled abroad. Yet, applying for a visa to direct this month's production of Così fan tutte at the English National Opera, he was asked for a deposit by Britain's visa office, to guarantee that he would not become a refugee. In Paris, recalling the malign absurdities of British red tape with quiet exasperation, he shrugs. "There's no room left for stamps in my passport. I've travelled abroad so many times, but have never thought of leaving my country. At my age I'm not going to change my mind." Despite the belated intervention of the British ambassador, Kiarostami was so fatigued by his "disgraceful treatment" that he withdrew from the project three weeks before curtain up. "As long as I didn't get an answer as to why they were treating me differently," he says, "I decided to renounce a great pleasure for myself."
The opera, which runs at the London Coliseum until 5 July, was directed by proxy by Elaine Tyler-Hall, his associate on last summer's original production at Aix-en-Provence (he has no trouble working in France). Its cinematic backdrop of a rippling Bay of Naples lends the set a painterly beauty, while heightening the pain, folly and cynical deception of the human comedy played out against it. While some critics have found the 18th-century staging bland, its largely gimmick-less transparency allows the disquieting sexual drama of infidelity and honour, reason and desire - sung in Martin Fitzpatrick's English translation - to come through with engaging clarity.
He has described opera as "closed-off and stuffy", yet smiles when recalling the three months he spent with Mozart as "one of my most beautiful experiences. Even if it is a very closed-up world, it's heaven." Though he had never been to an opera house before, watching videoed performances he found operatic sets "even heavier and denser than reality. The film projection was to open up the space, bring in some fresh air."
Warmly courteous behind his trademark dark glasses, he apologises for being preoccupied with rehearsing Juliette Binoche next door. Certified Copy, to be shot in Tuscany this month in French and English, will be his first feature to be filmed outside Iran. On the walls of MK2, the French company that co-produces his films, is some of his photographic work of zig-zag roads and snow-covered landscapes. (His visa problem meant he also missed the opening of an exhibition of his photography last month at the Purdy Hicks Gallery in London's Bankside.)
He developed an interest in photography in the 1970s from scouting for locations in the Iranian countryside, but has exhibited his work only since the 1990s; its global sales have helped to subsidise his films. "I film normal-life subjects in natural settings that some people would consider uncinematic. But what I want to show is nature itself, as the truth of life." He avoids human figures in his photography, and considers it a "purer" medium than cinema. "The moment of the picture is one of personal truth, not of a story. I feel something in a landscape and want to capture it; only that moment is shown."
Also a screenwriter and poet, Kiarostami has in recent years made video installations such as Sleepers, of two sleeping lovers, for the Venice Biennale in 2001, and Forest of Leaves (2005) at the V&A. For him, art can reframe even the trivial details of life, spurring us to take a fresh look at them. Films such as Close-Up (1990), which dramatised the case of an unemployed print worker arrested for passing himself off as the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makmalbaf, blur the line between fiction and documentary. His frequent intrusion of the filmmaking process forces viewers to question the boundaries between reality and representation, truth and fabrication, life and art.
His most recent film, Shirin, will be screened at the Edinburgh film festival on 19 June, with a UK-wide release a week later. A bold experiment, it is 90 minutes of close-ups of more than 100 women - including a headscarved Binoche - as they watch a film based on a 12th-century poem by Nezami Ganjavi about a love triangle involving an Armenian princess and a Persian prince. Light from a screen flickers on the women's faces; their expressions alone create the drama.
Shirin builds on Kiarostami's theatre piece Looking at Tazieh, which contained film of rural Iranians responding to the tazieh, a traditional Shia passion play on the martyrdom of Imam Hossein, spiritual leader of the dispossessed. For Kiarostami, the "beauty of art lies in the reaction it causes", and Shirin pushes the notion that "a work of art doesn't exist outside the perception of the audience". Football is a case in point: "22 men play, but millions have a common reaction. I've never been to a stadium, and I never look at the screen, but I watch the people watching the game. What's fascinating to me is their innocence; their ability to forget about daily concerns, and abandon themselves." Like many of his films, which appear naturalistic, Shirin is almost wholly artifice. He decided to juxtapose the poem only after filming, and spent six months in the editing suite. "I worked with professional actresses, each playing a six-minute sequence. I asked them to imagine their own inner film, about love, and show the expression it would provoke."
Shirin will not be shown in Iran, where none of his films has had a screening licence for a dozen years. Once released abroad, "half-price illegal copies find their way back into the country" as pirated DVDs. "Our government policy is focused on using cinema as a tool of propaganda and religious manipulation, as they've done for 30 years," he says. "Even tolerating independent cinema is unimaginable - they're very suspicious of it." Though women on screen must wear the hijab, "it's totally unrealistic, since they're veiled even inside their homes."
Kiarostami was born in 1940 in northern Iran. His father was a painter and decorator. "We were many children, with a minimal living, but with peace and quiet. I remember silence at home." After a degree in fine art at Tehran University, he worked as a graphic designer and for a film ad agency before joining the Centre for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) in 1969, established by the shah's wife. The filmmaking section he set up, and where he worked until 1992, left him free to experiment without commercial constraints. Bread and Alley (1970), a short about a boy with a loaf confronted by a dog, began a series of films that focus on children and their dilemmas, yet also pose subtly subversive questions about freedom and control, order and disorder. Under the strict censorship of the Pahlavi dictatorship and the shah's Savak secret police, Kiarostami depicted children as stubbornly determined free agents making moral choices, in an education system based on coercion and indoctrination.
His films have also been seen as a cinematic equivalent of Iranian modernist poetry of the 60s. "The calling of art is to extract us from our daily reality, to bring us to a hidden truth that's difficult to access - to a level that's not material but spiritual," he says. "That's what poetry and music do, and that was the first calling of religion. Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, stop thinking and accept what I tell you. That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect. Art is a better way of achieving that, though the aim is the same."
He shared the disillusionment as the 1979 Iranian revolution was overtaken by religious fundamentalism. "I took part in politics only twice: when I was 15 [after the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup against Muhammad Mossadeq restored the shah] and in the revolution," he says. "I'll never take part in any political events again. I'm sure revolution has legitimate motivations, but it's always emotional and irrational. This is what causes legitimacy to be lost. Then evil power comes and takes control, and leads it in another direction."
The early 80s were also a time of "internal revolution", as his 1969 marriage to Parvin Amir-Gholi, an art designer, was breaking up. The need to look after his two sons may be partly what kept him in Iran. Ahmad, who now lives in the US, works in computers and makes experimental films, while Bahman is a filmmaker and will edit his father's next film.
In The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), which won the Silver Lion at Venice, a man from Tehran travels to a remote village in Iranian Kurdistan and waits impatiently for an ailing woman to die so that he can film the local funeral rites for his TV company. It is a portrait of someone who knows what he is looking for and so sees nothing. Some critics have seen the film as an anthropological, even voyeuristic, view of provincial life. Yet there is a dose of self-satire in the manipulative big-city "communication engineer" who is unable to communicate and must learn to see differently.
Kiarostami's films are frequently seen as politically "escapist" or apolitical, a claim sometimes linked to a criticism in Iran that he makes films for foreign audiences. He has said that the politics in his films lies partly in his choice of subject matter or location - the rural poor, or Kurdish Iran - and believes cinema should ask questions, not answer them. "If political means partisan, I'd never make a political film; I'd never invite anyone to vote for one person or the opposition. I'm not pushing people to react, but trying to reach a truth of everyday life. As long as we try to touch this truth, it's essentially and profoundly political."
He began to experiment with digital film with ABC Africa (2001), about Aids orphans in Uganda. Ten (2002), in which a woman drives through Tehran conversing with a series of passengers, was filmed with two cameras on the dashboard and is his most polemical film in its blasts against the "rotten laws in this society [that] don't give any rights to women". Ten and other films have been credited with giving western audiences a deeper understanding of his country. Though he says that is not his direct intention, "the demonised image of Iran is related to the government, not the people. What we have inside - pain and sorrow - are universal. My toothache is the same as an American's or a Palestinian's. We all share the same relation to emotions and personal life."
Five (2003), he says, lies at the crossroads of poetry, photography and film. Devoid of dialogue, it consists of five long shots filmed by the Caspian sea, ranging from bobbing driftwood, to moonlight with frogs - the last of which took five months to shoot. Many films made today, he says, are "so shallow and one-dimensional that, despite the imagination of viewers, everything has been given to them. Unfinished cinema leaves room for the audience to take part in the creative process. It allows everyone to see their own film."
Asked whether he intended to vote in Iran's presidential election, held yesterday, he says: "I won't vote for a republic again. But if any candidate declared himself as a responsible power for life, I might well vote for them - I'd even go barefoot to vote. I can't vote for someone who, once they're elected, spends two years reinforcing his position, and the next two years preparing for the next vote." The remark suggests a despairing scepticism about the political process, which has seen President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad courting votes with tons of free potatoes, and has led growing numbers of the urban middle class to shun elections altogether. "More than the Islamic republic, I want to question the republic itself," he says. "Nowadays you can win a four-year mandate with the promise of a kilo of oranges. People have to be educated to be politically mature and independent."
He is more optimistic about cinema, even beyond the recognised talents of younger Iranians such as Samira Makhmalbaf and Bahman Ghobadi. "Here in the west you haven't seen anything of the new generation," he says. "There's a powerful network of underground independent cinema that you have yet to discover."
In a documentary about the making of Five, Kiarostami said he would not be annoyed if people took a short nap during the film. Is he concerned about losing his audience if he pushes minimalism too far? "There is a loss," he says. "Many people won't enter; they've been educated with a certain taste. But the essence of art is to touch and reach people - though not a great number. That's what cinema can do, if we consider it an art, not an industry."
Kiarostami on Kiarostami
"The actresses were looking at a white sheet of paper next to my camera. I asked them to think of a person or relationship in the past or present, something strongly emotional about love, then to freely imagine their own story and show the expression it would provoke. What was striking for me was the unity and coherence of their reactions, which were artificial but also true. That truth in feelings is very difficult to reach in any other kind of acting, because it relates to personal memories. There is a poem by [the 14th-century Persian poet] Hafez which says that the pain of love is constant, whoever has it, but it is also unique to each person."
