The Festival Incroci di Civiltà is proud to present a selection of the last works of Abbas Kiarostami, one of the most highly acclaimed directors of contemporary cinema.
Abbas Kiarostami
Born in Teheran in 1940, he began his career in the movie industry in the 1970s, when he worked at the Kānun (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults) where he enjoyed an extraordinary artistic freedom. Although he only achieved international recognition in the 1990s, with such masterpieces as Where is the Friend’s Home?, Close Up, Life, and Nothing More and Taste of Cherry, he was actually a “total” artist, able to give shape to meaning through several expressive media, from poetry to photography, from video art to theatre. In particular, during his final years before his recent death, he focused on the creation of short films, portraying the deepest truths of everyday life.
These short films are presented for the first time in a single event, which includes several national previews. These visual haikus are alternated with readings – both in Italian and Persian – of some equally short and stunning poems written by Kiarostami in the same period. The result is a sequence of images that seek the power of words, and of words that achieve the intensity of images, in a quest for essential form and unexpected epiphanies.
Program edited by Marco Dalla Gassa
Abbas Kiarostami's poems translated by Riccardo Zipoli
Readers: Reza Rashidi and Claudia Bellemo
