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When we discuss a filmmaker’s work, we mostly tend to focus on their full-length features. Often, we overlook important works such as documentaries, short films, and even the commercials. To fully appreciate their artistry, we should consider these other forms of storytelling as vital as the full-length features. Abbas Kiarostami is regarded as one of the greatest Iranian filmmakers. He is celebrated for films like “Close-Up,” “Where Is the Friend’s House?,” “Taste of Cherry,” “Shirin,” and “24 Frames.” However, he created many short films throughout his career such as “The Bread and the Alley,” “Two Solutions to One Problem,” “Solution One,” “Recess,” and “The Chorus” that reflect his mastery of artistry and portray a broader picture of his cinematic journey. These films capture contemporary Iran from a unique insider’s perspective, mirroring the societal zeitgeist on a deeper level.

Check also this article 25 Great Contemporary Iranian Movies

As a...

The news of the arrest of Jafar Panahi, Mostafa Al-Ahmad and Mohammad Rasoulof last week came to cement the oppressive tactics of the current Iranian regime, with the industry now being in more fear than ever for more incarcerations. At the same time, and despite these issues and the whole censorship that dominates all aspects of life, the Iranian movie industry remains rather vibrant, still one of the biggest in the world, with hundreds of movies produced every year. In a homage to both the arrested and the industry, we present 25 Iranian movies, released post-2010, in alphabetical order.

1. 180° Rule (2020) by Farnoosh Samadi

Based on real events, Samadi’s first feature film after 3 increasingly successful short ones, is not an easy work. It’s highly dramatic and is a real punch in the guts; we assist, unable to intervene, to a self-destructive behaviour that appears fool to say the least. However,...

“Everybody smile and say ‘cinema,'” young Myroslava Trofymchuk instructs several Ukrainian soldiers, as they obligingly pose and perform for her camera, their brawny tank reduced to a prop in the rubbly, wintry background. It’s the only time we see the masculine agents of conflict in “The Earth Is Blue as an Orange,” a documentary with its multiple lenses otherwise turned entirely on the women and children living through the War in Donbass. Under the fledgling filmmaker’s direction, however, the soldiers briefly become benevolent players in her vision of life under siege in Ukraine, where cinema sometimes feels like all she has to smile about; a momentary memory of kindness and goodwill is fashioned from the ashes of damage and trauma.

Trofymchuk is not the director of “The Earth Is Blue as an Orange”: That task falls to Kyiv-based poet and filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk, though as she...

Movingly presented in a special screening at the largest cinema in Cannes, Abbas Kiarostami’s final feature 24 Frames may be the most experimental film ever shown at the festival. Inspired by his desire to know what happens before and after what's depicted in an image, Kiarostami and a team of supremely talented animators and sound artists have rendered in motion 23 of the Iranian director’s photographs and one Bruegel painting, each brought to life for four and a half minutes.Throughout his career, Kiarostami, who died at the age of 76 last July, asked playful questions about where the line between cinema and life, construction and reality lay, and in later films like Ten (2002), Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003), Shirin (2008), and Like Someone in Love (2012), he has more directly confronted the audience with these innate ambiguities. The constant return suggests the permeable line—the levels of play and fictionalizing—of what cinema...

Baker, Nyoni, Jasper and Carpignano join Cannes veterans Denis, Ferrara, Dumont, Garrel and Gitai.Scroll Down For Full List

Tangerine director Sean Baker, the UK’s Rungano Nyoni and Italo-American film-maker Jonas Carpignano will be among the buzzed-about names premiering new works at the 49th edition of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight this year (18-28 May).

Artistic director Edouard Waintrop unveiled the eclectic selection, comprising 19 feature-length films and another 11 shorts, at a press conference at the Cinéma Le Grand Action in Paris on Thursday (20 April).

Read more: Cannes 2017: Official Selection in full

Opening And Closing Films

Claire Denis will open the 49th edition – running May 18-28 - with Un Beau Soleil Intérieur starring Juliette Binoche, Gérard Depardieu and Xavier Beauvois.

Us director Geremy Jasper’s debut feature Patti Cake$ - which world premiered at Sundance this year has been selected as the closing film.

Us Presence

It is one of two Sundance titles in this year’s selection...

When Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami died earlier this year, the outpouring of grief was a spectacle unmatched by any other from the film world in recent memory. Where the deaths of Jacques Rivette and Michael Cimino provoked shock and pain within the communities of their admirers, Kiarostami’s passing was of a different scale: it revealed the formative influence he exercised over the minds of a great many cinephiles, and suggested the reason that nobody seemed to be speaking about him was because there was little left to be said.

His funeral in Tehran was attended by a huge crowd of grievers, but the bustling scene paled in comparison to the sheer unanimity and ubiquity of the film community’s remorse. Like Chaplin, one of his favorite filmmakers, Kiarostami seemed to be liked by everyone.In what is plausibly Kiarostami’s last completed film, the nine-minute Cuban short “Passenger,” which...

Ten projects from South-East Europe, Middle East and North Africa comprise Sarajevo’s Work in Progress section.

Sarajevo Film Festival’s (Aug 12-20) Works in Progress strand is set to present the line-up of projects, which will compete for three awards during the festival’s Industry Days on Aug 17-18.

Ten projects in post-production - from Southeast Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus region - will be screened to about 40 industry decision-makers who are active on the supply end of the chain: funders, sales agents, distributors, broadcasters and festival programmers.

Prizes will include the traditional post-production in-kind awards from Slovenia’s Restart (€20,000) and Berlin-based The Post Republic (€50,000), as well as a newly established €30,000 cash prize from Turkish broadcaster Trt.

The jury is comprised of Jan Naszewski of New Europe Film Sales, Giona A. Nazzaro from the Venice Film Festival Critics’ Week, Michael Reuter of The Post Republic and a representative from the Trt.[p...

Abbas Kiarostami Photo: Pedro J Pacheco

Acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has died, it was revealed today. The 76 year old auteur, who won the Palme d'Or in 1997 for Taste Of Cherry, had been undergoing treatment fo gastrointestinal cancer in a Paris hospital.

Unlike many of his peers, Kiarostami remained in Iran fter the revolution, endearing himself to its people as he strove to help it develop a unique approach to cinema. He won acclaim for Works like The Wind Will Carry Us and Life, And Nothing More and Shirin, and enjoyed a second career as a producer, helping to launch Jafar Panahi's carer with The White Balloon. His last two films, however, were made abroad - Certified Copy in Italy and Like Someone In Love in Japan.

"Abbas Kiarostami's deep and unique view on life and his call to human beings for peace and friendship will remain a lasting achievement,...

Photo by Nosrat Panahi NejadWe are heartbroken to learn that Iran's greatest filmmaker, and one of the cinema's most important, innovative and moving artists, Abbas Kiarostami, has died at the age of 76. He won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997 for Taste of Cherry, but his sprawling and varied filmography, beginning in 1970 in Iran and ending in Japan for 2012's Like Someone in Love, carried immeasurable impact on international cinema.Below you can find our specific writing about with the director over the years.Spectators as Characters: Close-Up on Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin by Matthew Harrison TedfordPutting the Parts Together: A Conversation with Abbas Kiarostami by Daniel KasmanAbbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love by Daniel KasmanLove Streams: Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy by Michael SicinskiWatching the Watchers: Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin by David Cairns...

Palme d’Or-winning Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, best known for films like “Taste of Cherry” (which earned him the Cannes accolade in 1997), “Close-Up” and “Certified Copy,” has died. He was 76.

The news was first reported by the Iranian Students’ New Agency (Isna) on Monday afternoon, who wrote “Abbas Kiarostami, who had travelled to France for treatment, has died.” Other news outlets, including The Guardian, have also begun reporting the news.

Born in 1940 in Tehran, the filmmaker first studied painting at the University of Tehran; later, he worked as a graphic designer and commercial director. Kiarostami credited a job in the film department at Kanun (the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults) for shaping him into a filmmaker.

He made his first feature, “The Report,” in 1977, just two years before the 1979 revolution that saw so many of his creative peers leave the country. Kiarostami, however, stayed and...

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has died in Paris at the age of 76. The acclaimed helmer had been receiving treatment for gastrointestinal cancer and had traveled to France for a series of operations.

The Tehran-born Kiarostami first started making shorts, documentaries and local films back in the 1970s and stayed in Iran after the revolution where he made the famed Koker trilogy. He first came to prominence on the international scene with 1990's "Close-Up" in which he got the actual people in a real-life incident to re-enact events in a man defrauds a family and ultimately went to trial.

His 1997 film "Taste of Cherry," about a man searching for someone to bury him after he commits suicide, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He followed that with "The Wind Will Carry Us," "Ten," "Tickets" and "Shirin" along with his most recent and widely viewed films - the Juliette Binoche...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Jessica Chastain, Juliette Binoche, Freida Pinto, Catherine Hardwicke, Amma Asante, Marielle Heller, Ziyi Zhang, Haifaa Al Mansour, and more women have launched the company We Do It Together to produce films and TV that boost the empowerment of women, Variety reports.

Dustin Hoffman discusses his screen test for The Graduate, plus read Frank Rich‘s Criterion essay:

Though The Graduate upholds some of the classic tropes of Hollywood romantic comedy dating back to the 1930s—especially in its climactic deployment of a runaway bride—Benjamin’s paralyzing emotional disconnect from the world around him is what makes his story both fresh and particular to its own time.

The...

"There was no better filmmaker working at the dawn of the twenty-first century than Abbas Kiarostami," argued Michael J. Anderson in 2009. Today, we celebrate the renowned Iranian filmmaker's 75th birthday by linking to a few essential essays, such as Michael Sicinski's on Certified Copy and Jonathan Rosenbaum's dialogue with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa on Shirin, and flagging the new issue of the excellent magazine, Fireflies. We've got a snippet from an interview in which Kiarostami suggests that The Report, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love might constitute a trilogy. Meantime, his next film will be out in 2016. » - David Hudson...

"There was no better filmmaker working at the dawn of the twenty-first century than Abbas Kiarostami," argued Michael J. Anderson in 2009. Today, we celebrate the renowned Iranian filmmaker's 75th birthday by linking to a few essential essays, such as Michael Sicinski's on Certified Copy and Jonathan Rosenbaum's dialogue with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa on Shirin, and flagging the new issue of the excellent magazine, Fireflies. We've got a snippet from an interview in which Kiarostami suggests that The Report, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love might constitute a trilogy. Meantime, his next film will be out in 2016. » - David Hudson...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008) is playing on Mubi Us through October 7, 2014.

As Abbas Kiarostami's 2008 Shirin begins, viewers hear a gate open or close, followed by dripping water and slow, deliberate footsteps. One might imagine a dark and musty dungeon with the faint shadow of an unseen figure sweeping across the stone wall. But the scene is a mystery and this would only be speculation. A close-up shot reveals a woman in a room so dark her hair and hijab almost disappear. She stares forward with a look of tempered curiosity as she pops a snack into her mouth. The footsteps continue and it’s immediately clear that the woman is in a theater watching the film to which the sounds belong.

The next scene is similar, with a different woman who appears to be patiently anticipating plot development.

The mastery of Abbas Kiarostami is most evident, perhaps, in his restraint, in the depth he suggests through omission. His films routinely aspire to the frustration of curiosity: Audiences are intrigued by their mysteries, teased into fascination, and finally abandoned without the satisfaction of closure. But it's precisely the absence of answers that makes the questions endure. This is the key to their richness.

In Taste of Cherry, the fate of a man seeking death is obscured by an invitation to ponder our own morality. In Shirin, we study the faces of women as they remain transfixed by a movie screen we never see. The Wind Will Carry Us, one of Kiarostami's greatest, likewise bristles with secrecy, and much of its mystique is derived from the sensation tha...

The Doha Film Institute will organise a retrospective devoted to Abbas Kiarostami at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.

The programme, which runs Sept 13-21, will include 14 short and feature films. Kiarostami himself is expected to attend and to make appearances at screenings.

Abdulaziz Al Khater, CEO of Doha Film Institute, said: “Dfi is proud to present this rich selection of Abbas Kiarostami’s great works for the first time in the region. We are not only sharing some of the finest world cinema with Qatar’s audiences, but we also hope to inspire local and regional talent to expand boundaries of traditional filmmaking to experiment with various media, styles, and interpretations.”

Ludmila Cvikova, Head of Film Programming at Doha Film Institute, said: “One of the most admired contemporary auteurs of cinema, Abbas Kiarostami is an inspiration for emerging as well as established filmmakers. His approach to filmmaking, which often defies conventional techniques, is much discussed...

Every year since 2000, the Jeonju International Film Festival has commissioned three short works for its Jeonju Digital Project and, about a month ago now, the festival announced it'd selected Raya Martin, Vimukthi Jayasundara and Ying Liang for this year's edition (you may remember the three directors' video messages). The 2011 films are still making the rounds, and in fact, when they screen tomorrow at Exit Art, two of them — Claire Denis's To the Devil and José Luis Guerín's Memories of a Morning, both 45 minutes — will be seeing their NYC premieres. The third is Jean-Marie Straub's An Heir (22 mins, image above). If you're planning on being there, you'll want to read Robert Koehler's dispatch from Locarno last summer, touching briefly on the Denis and Guerín films but really digging into the Straub.

Reading. "With the main focus on African and Asian cinema and documentary film, Camera Lucida no 7 also...

"Nearly all of the writing thus far on This Is Not a Film has concentrated on its political context and production circumstances — already legend — and the courageous gesture the film represents," wrote Girish Shambu late last month as he looked back on the highlights of Toronto and named Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi's collaborative effort as his personal "Best-of-Fest." "This is entirely appropriate, but the film also holds enormous potential for future analysis by film critics as a work of meta-cinema that asks fundamental questions like: What is the difference between a screenplay and a film? (Once upon a time, in the nouvelle vague era, an answer to this question was simply: 'miss en scene.') Is the 'director' of a film always a single, unified, human person? In a film, can the role of the director 'move around,' in non-human form, attaching at one moment to the...

Last week, David Bordwell posted "a brief tribute to the volcanic charm of the legend known as Jcc." Brief, maybe, but as always with David Bordwell, necessary in ways you may not have realized until you've read it. Today, as Jean-Claude Carrière — actor, novelist and screenwriter probably best known for his work with Luis Buñuel, though he's also written screenplays for Godard, Oshima, Malle, Forman, Wajda and Jonathan Glazer (and that's just scratching the surface) — turns 80, two paragraphs from this must-read:

Jcc entered cinema under the aegis of Jacques Tati. Tati wanted someone to turn M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle into novels, and the very young writer seemed the right candidate. But Tati quickly learned that Jcc didn't know how a film was made. So he assigned Pierre Etaix and the editor Suzanne Baron to tutor the lad in the ways of cinema. First lesson: Go through M. Hulot on a flatbed viewer,...

Certified Copy, the title of writer/director Abbas Kiarostami's latest film, comes from the name of a book-length essay by one of its leads, lecturer and art historian James Miller (William Shimell). And, like much of the Iranian filmmaker's work, the believable observations are present from the very start; when Miller enters a room to begin a speech, the place is about two-thirds full. Miller plows ahead the distracted assertion of a man used to holding his own before crowds -- his voice fills the room with a sueded elegance. But coming after his game (and game-playing), 2008 diversion, Shirin, Certified Copy is something unique to Kiarostami's career, bringing to mind an adjective I never thought I'd append to him: adorable.

Each month we breakdown which theatrical releases are worth your movie-going dollars. Now in our new recurring column, we’ll be offering Netflix Instant Watch alternatives to supplement your theater-going experience.

This week action, aliens and romance hit the theaters, and we’ve culled a list of complimentary features currently available online.

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Battle: Los Angeles

Aaron Eckhart plays a former Marine sergeant leading Los Angeles in the battle against invading alien forces in this big-budget action-thriller.

For an alien double feature, pair Battle: Los Angeles with one of these sci-fi flicks:

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition (1977) – One of the ultimate alien tales, this Spielberg-directed classic follows a man (Richard Dreyfuss) who struggles to understand the visions he’s started having after his own close encounter. Whether it’s your first time or your thirtieth, you will be in awe of this sci-fi masterpiece.

• Bill Stamets and Roger Ebert

The 46th Chicago International Film Festival will play this year at one central location, on the many screens of the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois. A festivalgoers and filmmakers' lounge will be open during festival hours at the Lucky Strike on the second level. Tickets can be ordered online at Ciff's website, which also organizes the films by title, director and country. Tickets also at AMC; sold out films have Rush Lines. More capsules will be added here.

"127 Hours" (USA)A tour de force by James Franco and Danny Boyle ("Slumdog Millionaire"). Many are familiar with the true story, and just as many probably thought it could never be filmed. Boyle succeeds. A climber named Aron Ralston went climbing by himself in remote canyons, and was trapped deep in a crevice when a falling rock pinned his arm. He had limited food and water, no...

Abbas Kiarostami's new movie is a stylish and mysterious study of relationships, with powerful central performances

A certain obliquity is necessary for anyone working within a repressive regime like the Iran of the ayatollahs, and the circumspection of movie-makers there has contributed to the creation of a subtle, allusive, allegorical cinema. The 70-year-old Abbas Kiarostami, who initially studied painting and design at Tehran University before entering the film business, eventually attracted an international following after making an impact on the festival circuit with the so-called Koker trilogy made between 1987 and 1994, about life in a remote Iranian village and the impact of an earthquake that occurred there in 1990.

He is perhaps the most distinctive of a remarkable generation of Iranian film-makers. The influences on his work range from the Italian neorealists to Pirandello, and he has developed a highly individual style that involves long takes, working with non-professional casts, and...

Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men is the latest in a long line of great Iranian movies

The first decade of the 21st century has been an extraordinary time for Iranian film-makers, starting with joint Caméra d'Or wins for Hassan Yektapanah's Djomeh and Bahman Ghobadi's A Time for Drunken Horses at the 2000 Cannes film festival. Since then we have been treated to such wildly differing visions as Rafi Pitts's haunting It's Winter, with its oddly epic sense of domestic turmoil, and Jafar Panahi's Offside, arguably the best football movie ever made. In 2008 Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis picked up an Oscar nomination, while in 2010 Cannes favourite Abbas Kiarostami steered Juliette Binoche to a best actress award in Certified Copy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the problems of film-making in Iran (Panahi was unable to sit on the jury at Cannes this year because he was in prison for allegedly...

Opening with Ridley Scott's Robin Hood and closing with Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel, this year's Cannes film festival is not quite the 2009 auteur smackdown, but there will be plenty of riches from Godard, Kiarostami and co

It should by rights have gone stale by now, but the announcement of the Cannes competition list is an annual event which retains for me its fascination and excitement, although I have just now made the mistake of watching the TV Cannes hype reel online, guaranteed to take the seasoned Cannes-lover from lip-smacking anticipation to nauseated satiety in just under three-and-a-quarter minutes.

Cannes 2010 sure does have a heck of an act to follow in the form of Cannes 2009, which provided four of the most avidly talked-about and enthused-over movies of last year: The White Ribbon, Inglourious Basterds, A Prophet and Antichrist. It also provided a bona fide animated classic in the form of Up,...

The red carpet has been rolled up, the trophies stashed safely in cupboards. But we're still partying: Becky Carroll selects her top film clips celebrating the Oscars

Sick of watching replays of Sandra Bullock's sobby Oscar speech? Bored to the back teeth of Kathryn Bigelow's shout-out to the troops? One thing about those Academy Awards acceptance speeches is that they tend, for all the professionalism of those involved, to be a little, well, unscripted. There's no better place to turn, then, to the movies themselves, and Hollywood's presentation of its own big backslap. If you should always write about what you know, films themselves must be the best place to find believable depictions of the tears, egos and tantrums of the night of a thousand stars.

Looking through these clips, it's the 1940s and 50s - an age of relative innocence in terms of celebrity - which seem...

Hollywood struggled to respond to the war on terror, documentaries went through a golden age, and Michael Haneke was the noughties' moral conscience

If it is possible to whimper at the volume of a bang, then that is how this decade is ending on the big screen: with two high-profile, high-budget movies about the end of the world: Roland Emmerich's cheerfully silly 2012, and John Hillcoat's cheerlessly serious The Road, which arrive with a good deal of commentary to the effect that these movies typify the zeitgeist of the decade.

The noughties – that jokey word coined in the carefree 90s – are seen as damaged, injured, traumatised. The decade looks cracked from top to bottom by a sensational act of terrorism; by a reaction that achieved neither political palliative nor military success; by the confrontation between first-world prosperity and developing-world poverty; by the coming environmental catastrophe that threatens to engulf both; and finally,...