Screen
Harsh lessons
Abbas Kiarostami portrayed childhood with great sensitivity. But his son says he was a tyrant
by SUKHDEV SANDHU
© JOAQUIN SARMIENTO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
In his lifetime the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was revered by fellow directors as much as by critics. Martin Scorsese proclaimed he “represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema.” For Jean-Luc Godard, “film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.” Born in Tehran in 1940, he was also a photographer and a poet and brought his feeling for those forms into his elegant, elliptical films. Of all the great Iranian directors of the 1980s and 1990s—Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi and Jafar Panahi—the reputation of Kiarostami, who died in 2016, was the most stellar.