Abbas Kiarostami at Bard College with Five, March 4, 2007

Abstract

In the months following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, filmmaking itself looked to be an endangered art form. Some Iranian filmmakers left the country; Abbas Kiarostami stayed—though for a time he was not making films. He turned to photography and produced a distinguished body of landscape representation. Then he returned to filmmaking, working far from Tehran in the Iranian countryside and in a low-key, but powerful and passionate way distinct from his more urban pre-revolutionary work. This public interview (at Bard College) with Kiarostami focuses on his experimental film Five (2003), a film originally made for an event in honor of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. Five is made up of five very minimal scenes, filmed at the edge of the Caspian Sea: scenes of a quiet surf, of several dogs hanging out on the beach, of a gaggle of geese and ducks, of men walking on a boardwalk, and, in the longest scene, a full moon reflected in the water. Five now seems a premonition of the final film Kiarostami finished before his death in 2016, 24 Frames (2018).