Directing in the Style of Abbas Kiarostami

The Principle

Abbas Kiarostami made cinema that is perpetually aware of itself as cinema — not in the self-referential, playful manner of postmodern pastiche, but with a philosophical seriousness that transforms every film into a meditation on seeing, telling, and the relationship between what is real and what is represented. His films ask: What happens when a camera enters a space? How does the act of filming change the thing being filmed? Where does documentary end and fiction begin — and does that boundary matter? These are not abstract questions for Kiarostami; they are the practical, ethical, and aesthetic challenges that arise every time someone points a camera at another human being and says, "Tell me your story."

Kiarostami's method is deceptively simple. His films feature non-professional actors, real locations, minimal equipment, natural light, and narratives drawn from or inspired by actual events. Where Is the Friend's House? (1987) follows a boy trying to return a classmate's notebook. Taste of Cherry (1997) follows a man driving through Tehran's outskirts looking for someone to help him die. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) follows a man waiting in a remote Kurdish village for an old woman to die so he can document the mourning ritual. The premises are spare, the execution seemingly artless. But within this apparent simplicity, Kiarostami constructs experiences of extraordinary philosophical depth — films that interrogate their own construction, question their own premises, and invite the audience into a collaborative act of meaning-making that conventional cinema, with its closed narratives and resolved conclusions, does not permit.

The Iranian landscape is Kiarostami's co-author. The winding roads of northern Iran, the bare hills around Tehran, the zigzag paths of the Koker region — these are not backdrops but active elements of the cinematic experience. Kiarostami's camera finds in these landscapes a visual language for the human condition: the road that curves out of sight as a metaphor for uncertain futures, the hill that must be climbed as an expression of effort and persistence, the vast sky that dwarfs the human figure as a reminder of proportion. The landscape is beautiful but never picturesque — it is too functional, too worked, too inhabited by real people with real lives for postcard beauty. It is beautiful in the way that truth is beautiful: because it is exactly and specifically what it is.

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Cinema About Cinema: The Self-Reflexive Method

Close-Up: The Trial of Imitation

Close-Up (1990) is perhaps the purest expression of Kiarostami's self-reflexive method. Based on a true incident, the film tells the story of Hossain Sabzian, a poor man who impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and was taken in by a middle-class Tehran family who believed he would cast them in his next film. Kiarostami gained access to Sabzian's trial and filmed it, then reconstructed the events leading to the trial with the actual participants — Sabzian playing himself, the family playing themselves — creating a hybrid of documentary and fiction that makes the boundary between the two irrelevant.

The film's genius is that it takes Sabzian's deception seriously as an act of artistic desire. Sabzian did not impersonate Makhmalbaf for money or malice but because he wanted, desperately, to be part of the world of cinema — to see and be seen in the way that cinema promises. Kiarostami recognizes in this desire a mirror of his own: every filmmaker is, in some sense, an impersonator, someone who constructs a version of reality and asks others to believe in it. Close-Up is simultaneously about a specific man's specific deception and about the fundamental nature of cinematic representation — the way all films, including this one, ask their audiences to accept an imitation of reality as reality itself.

The Koker Trilogy: Films Within Films

Where Is the Friend's House? (1987), And Life Goes On (1992), and Through the Olive Trees (1994) form a trilogy in which each film reflects on the one before it. Where Is the Friend's House? is a straightforward narrative — a boy searches for his classmate's home to return a notebook. And Life Goes On follows a filmmaker (playing a version of Kiarostami) driving through the Koker region after the 1990 earthquake, searching for the child actors from the first film. Through the Olive Trees takes place on the set of And Life Goes On, following the real-life love story between two non-professional actors during the filming.

Each film opens a new layer of reality: the fiction, the filmmaker behind the fiction, the lives behind the filmmaker. But rather than creating an infinite regress of meta-commentary, the trilogy moves progressively closer to life itself — from the constructed narrative of the first film to the genuine, unscripted feelings of the real people in the third. Kiarostami's self-reflexivity does not lead away from reality but toward it, using the awareness of cinema's artifice to get closer to what is true rather than further from it.

The Unfinished Film

Kiarostami's films frequently feel deliberately incomplete — scenes end before they resolve, characters disappear from the narrative, key events happen off-screen, endings refuse closure. Taste of Cherry's final sequence — a grainy video of the film crew on location, the actor alive and well, soldiers resting on a hillside — breaks the fiction entirely, revealing the apparatus of production. This is not a failure of storytelling but a philosophical position: life is not a story, and the conventions that cinema uses to make it look like one — resolution, closure, emotional catharsis — are falsifications. Kiarostami prefers the honest incompleteness of a film that acknowledges its own limits to the dishonest completeness of a film that pretends to contain all the answers.

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The Car as Confessional Space

The Automobile as Cinema

Kiarostami discovered that the interior of a moving car is one of cinema's most productive spaces. The car is a confessional — a small, enclosed, private space where two people sit side by side (rather than face to face) and talk with a freedom that open spaces do not permit. The car is also a camera — its windshield frames the passing landscape, its mirrors provide alternative angles, its movement creates a continuously changing image. And the car is a metaphor — for the journey, for the passage of time, for the search that structures so many of Kiarostami's narratives.

Taste of Cherry (1997) takes place almost entirely within a car as Mr. Badii drives through Tehran's periphery, offering rides to strangers and asking each if they will agree to bury him after his suicide. The car becomes the film's entire world: its interior the space of intimate conversation, its windows the frame through which the landscape is seen, its circular route through the hills the narrative structure itself. Ten (2002) extends this method to its logical extreme — ten conversations in a car, shot with two dashboard-mounted digital cameras, the filmmaker entirely absent from the production process.

Intimacy Through Side-by-Side Framing

The car's spatial arrangement — two people facing forward, not looking at each other — produces a particular quality of intimacy. Characters speak more freely when they are not face-to-face. Confessions, arguments, and revelations emerge from the side-by-side position as they would not from a conventional dialogue setup. Kiarostami exploits this quality by holding on the passenger or driver in extended takes, allowing the conversation to develop at its own pace, the passing landscape visible through the windows as a counterpoint to the intensity of the exchange.

The Road as Narrative Structure

Kiarostami's roads — the winding mountain roads of northern Iran, the dusty roads around Tehran, the zigzag path in Koker — are more than settings; they are narrative structures. The road that curves out of sight creates suspense: what is around the bend? The road that climbs a hill creates effort: the character must work to reach the top. The road that returns to its starting point creates circularity: the narrative ends where it began, unchanged or changed in ways that are not immediately visible. Kiarostami's narratives follow the logic of the road rather than the logic of conventional dramatic structure, arriving at their destinations by indirect routes that mirror the indirectness of life itself.

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Documentary-Fiction Boundary

The Productive Ambiguity

Kiarostami's films inhabit the space between documentary and fiction so thoroughly that the distinction becomes meaningless. In Close-Up, real people play themselves in reconstructed versions of events that actually happened, directed by a filmmaker whose presence in the story is both acknowledged and concealed. In Through the Olive Trees, the filming of a fiction film is documented, but the documentation is itself a fiction, staged and directed. In Homework (1989), Kiarostami interviews schoolchildren about their homework, but the act of interviewing — the camera's presence, the filmmaker's questions — transforms the documentary material into something that is neither purely observed nor purely constructed.

This is not confusion but clarity: Kiarostami understands that the camera always changes what it records, that the presence of a filmmaker always transforms the situation being filmed, and that the most honest cinema is the cinema that acknowledges this transformation rather than pretending it does not occur. His films do not dissolve the boundary between documentary and fiction in order to deceive but in order to reveal — to show how all representation, all storytelling, all cinema is a negotiation between what is and what is made.

Non-Professional Actors as Themselves

Kiarostami's use of non-professional actors — villagers, children, workers, the actual people involved in the stories he tells — is central to his blurring of documentary and fiction. These performers bring to the screen a quality of authentic presence that trained actors cannot replicate: the specific way a farmer holds a tool, the rhythm of a child's speech, the physical habit of a body that has lived in a particular place doing particular work. Kiarostami does not direct these performers toward an ideal performance but creates situations in which their natural behavior becomes the performance. The line between acting and being dissolves — and with it, the line between the film and the life it represents.

The Ethical Question

Kiarostami's method raises ethical questions that he does not shy away from. The Wind Will Carry Us follows a filmmaker who arrives in a Kurdish village to document a mourning ritual, and who finds himself increasingly uncomfortable with the predatory nature of his project — waiting for a woman to die so that he can film what follows. The filmmaker is a version of Kiarostami himself, and the film is a self-examination: an interrogation of the ethics of filmmaking, of the power dynamics between the filmmaker and the filmed, of the cost of treating other people's lives as material. Kiarostami does not resolve these questions. He holds them open, making the audience share in the discomfort.

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The Iranian Landscape as Visual Philosophy

Roads, Hills, and the Zigzag Path

The landscape of northern Iran — its bare hills, its winding roads, its scattered villages — is Kiarostami's primary visual vocabulary. The famous zigzag path in Where Is the Friend's House? — a dirt track climbing a hillside in sharp switchbacks — is both a literal obstacle the boy must navigate and a visual expression of the effort, persistence, and indirectness of all journeys. The hills around Tehran in Taste of Cherry — their muted colors, their construction sites, their views of the city below — create a liminal space between urban and rural, between the living and the dead, between the present and the geological past. Kiarostami finds in these landscapes a beauty that is inseparable from their meaning: the beauty of a world that is indifferent to human concerns but that, precisely through this indifference, offers a context of proportion and permanence.

The Olive Tree and the Cherry Tree

Natural elements in Kiarostami's cinema carry meaning without becoming symbols. The olive trees in Through the Olive Trees are simply olive trees — but their presence, their age, their rootedness in a landscape that has been shaken by an earthquake, gives them a resonance that exceeds their physical reality. The cherry tree that Mr. Badii pauses to notice in Taste of Cherry — a moment of natural beauty in the midst of his suicidal despair — is not a symbol of hope or rebirth but an experience: the tree is beautiful, Mr. Badii sees it, and for a moment, beauty breaks through the narrative of death. Kiarostami trusts that the audience can hold both the beauty and the despair without reducing either to a lesson.

Wind as Presence

The wind that appears in Kiarostami's title — The Wind Will Carry Us — and in his imagery (wheat fields bending, dust rising, curtains moving) is his most frequent natural motif. Wind is invisible but perceptible, forceful but intangible, present but uncontrollable. It is, for Kiarostami, the perfect figure for what cinema tries and fails to capture: the movement of time, the passage of experience, the forces that shape human lives without being reducible to human understanding. Wind blows through his films — literally and figuratively — as a reminder that the world exceeds the frame, that life exceeds the story, and that cinema's most honest gesture is to acknowledge what it cannot contain.

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Certified Copy and the Late Expansion

The Fiction of Identity

Certified Copy (2010), Kiarostami's first film made outside Iran, applies his documentary-fiction method to the question of personal identity. A man and a woman — a British writer and a French antiques dealer — meet in Tuscany. At first they appear to be strangers; gradually, they begin to speak and behave as if they are a long-married couple. The film never clarifies whether they are strangers playing a game or a couple who have been pretending to be strangers. This ambiguity is not a puzzle to be solved but a philosophical proposition: if a copy is indistinguishable from an original, is the distinction meaningful? If two people act like a couple, are they a couple? If a film looks like life, is it life?

The film's title refers both to its central intellectual question (the writer's book argues that copies are as valuable as originals) and to its own status as a work of art: a certified copy of reality, an imitation that aspires to the authority of the authentic. Kiarostami transforms a Tuscan walking tour into a meditation on the nature of authenticity, relationship, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we are with. Juliette Binoche's performance — shifting between registers of distance and intimacy, irritation and tenderness — is the vehicle for this philosophical exploration, and her face becomes the screen on which the film's central ambiguity is projected.

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Writing/Directing Specifications

1. Make the apparatus of filmmaking visible within the film. The camera, the director, the process of constructing the narrative should be acknowledged rather than concealed. This does not mean every film must be explicitly about filmmaking, but the audience should sense that the film is aware of itself as a constructed object — through incomplete narratives, acknowledged artifice, or the presence of the filmmaking process within the story.

2. Use the interior of a moving car as a primary dramatic space. Conversations in cars — with the side-by-side framing, the passing landscape visible through windows, and the intimacy of the enclosed space — should be a central formal strategy. Let conversations develop at their own pace within extended takes. Use the car's movement as narrative structure and the windshield as a secondary frame.

3. Dissolve the boundary between documentary and fiction. Use non-professional actors playing versions of themselves. Draw narratives from actual events and real situations. Create conditions in which authentic behavior emerges from structured situations. Do not attempt to resolve the ambiguity between the real and the constructed — let it stand as the film's ethical and aesthetic position.

4. Film the landscape as a philosophical register. Roads, hills, trees, wind, sky, and earth should carry meaning not through symbolism but through the attentiveness of the camera's gaze. The landscape should be shown as what it is — worked, inhabited, weather-beaten, beautiful — and its relationship to the human figures within it should express the relationship between the individual and the world that exceeds individual comprehension.

5. Employ narrative incompleteness as a deliberate strategy. Key events should happen off-screen. Characters should disappear from the narrative without explanation. Endings should refuse conventional closure. The audience should be left with questions rather than answers, and these questions should feel not like failures of storytelling but like honest acknowledgments of what stories cannot contain.

6. Direct non-professional actors by creating situations rather than prescribing performances. Explain the scenario, establish the emotional conditions, and let the non-professional respond naturally. Film extended takes that allow behavior to develop and surprise. Value the authentic gesture — the way a real person holds their body, pauses before speaking, or looks away — over the polished performance of a trained actor.

7. Structure narratives around searches, journeys, and quests that may not reach their destinations. A character looking for a house, a person, an answer, or a reason to live provides the narrative engine. The journey itself — the encounters along the way, the landscape traversed, the conversations had — should be more important than the destination. Allow the search to be frustrated, redirected, or abandoned without treating this as narrative failure.

8. Use natural light exclusively and shoot on real locations with minimal equipment. The image should have the quality of found light — the specific brightness of an Iranian afternoon, the dimness of a village interior, the golden hour that makes the landscape glow. Avoid the designed, controlled look of studio production. The image should feel like the filmmaker walked into a real place with a camera and recorded what was there.

9. Build self-reflexive layers that move toward life rather than away from it. When a film comments on its own construction, when a story contains a story about storytelling, the movement should be toward greater authenticity, not greater abstraction. Each layer of self-awareness should bring the audience closer to the lived experience of the people on screen, using the acknowledgment of artifice as a tool for approaching truth.

10. End with an image held at a distance — a long shot of a figure in a landscape, the outcome of the journey uncertain, the narrative open. The final shot should place the human figure within the larger context of the landscape that has been the film's visual and philosophical foundation. The ending should feel like the film is releasing its hold on the story, acknowledging that the lives it has observed will continue beyond the frame, the road will curve out of sight, and the wind will carry what it carries regardless of whether the camera is there to record it.