Abbas Kiarostami: The poet behind the camera

I keep thinking of a child with a notebook. In Abbas Kiarostami's 'Where Is the Friend's House?', a schoolboy named Ahmad opens his schoolbag at home and realises he has accidentally taken his classmate's notebook. It is no minor error; their teacher has just warned the other boy that one more forgotten notebook will mean expulsion. 

Ahmad could easily ignore it, wait until morning, or decide it is not his problem. Instead, notebook in hand, he slips away to search for his friend's house in a neighbouring village.

That is the entire premise: a child, a notebook, and a walk between villages. Yet, in Kiarostami's hands, this small errand becomes quietly monumental—a study in responsibility, fear, innocence, and the lonely burden of doing the right thing.

On his birthday, this is the Abbas Kiarostami I want to remember. Not just the titan of Iranian cinema born in Tehran on 22 June 1940, but the patient observer. He was a filmmaker who understood that life rarely announces its meaning loudly; instead, it hides in a child's anxiety, sits beside a driver in a car, or waits along a dusty road.

Before his work entered the canon of world cinema, Kiarostami studied painting and graphic arts at the University of Tehran, designing posters, illustrating children's books, and directing commercials. In 1969, he joined Kanoon—the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults—a pivotal space that profoundly shaped his early filmmaking.

He understood how little cinema truly needed: a road, a face, a tree, a car window. His films are sparse, but never empty; they are dense with the things we routinely overlook—pauses, waiting, fleeting gestures of kindness. Kiarostami didn't minimize life; he simply cleared away the noise surrounding it.

Perhaps this is why calling him a "poet with a camera" feels so precise. He did write poetry and publish books of photography, but the deeper truth is that he directed films as poems. He refused to over-explain, choosing instead to leave space and trust silence. In his essay An Unfinished Cinema, he wrote that a narrative requires "gaps, empty spaces," championing a cinema ultimately completed by "the creative spirit of the audience."

That idea explains so much about his art. Kiarostami did not want passive viewers. He wanted viewers who could think, feel, doubt, and complete the film inside themselves. What is the duty of Ahmad? What is the truth of Hossein Sabzian? What keeps Mr Badii attached to life? Kiarostami never rushes to answer these questions for us. He places them before us and quietly steps back.

'Close-Up' remains one of the clearest examples of his genius. It is based on the true story of Hossein Sabzian, a poor lover of cinema who pretended to be the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Another director might have turned him into a joke or a villain. Kiarostami did something much harder. He looked at him with compassion. 

Was it fraud? Was it longing? Was it shame? Was it a desperate love for cinema? The answer is not simple. Sabzian's lie is wrong, but it is also wounded. Kiarostami allows us to see this without turning the film into a sermon.

In Taste of Cherry, which won the Palme d'Or in 1997, Mr. Badii drives through the hills of Tehran seeking someone to bury him after he commits suicide. 

Summarising it risks making it sound merely bleak, yet the film is less about death than the fragile reasons for staying alive: a conversation, a memory, a taste, a bit of sunlight. 

The ordinary world constantly interrupts his despair. Kiarostami asks us to confront mortality without exploiting it, letting emotion arrive slowly, leaving behind a profound tenderness for life.

The Wind Will Carry Us derives its title from a poem by Forough Farrokhzad, highlighting Kiarostami's poetic sensibilities. The narrative follows a city filmmaker in a remote Kurdish village, waiting for an elderly woman to die so he can record a unique funeral ritual. 

Ultimately, the waiting eclipses the event; the village outgrows the visitor's agenda. As the outsider waits for death, vibrant life continues in the background. The world stubbornly refuses to become just a subject for someone else's camera.

This is one reason Kiarostami still matters so much. We live in a time when everything is made to be consumed quickly. Stories arrive with their emotions already decided for us. Kiarostami's cinema asks for the opposite. It asks for patience. It asks for humility. It asks us to stop behaving as if the world exists only to be understood instantly.

Abbas Kiarostami died in Paris on 4 July 2016. But there is something almost wrong about speaking of him only in the past tense. His cinema is still active. It asks us to look again at things we thought were too ordinary to deserve attention. A notebook. A road. A face. A taste of cherry. The wind.

On his birthday, one should not remember him with noise. One should remember him with attention. With a little silence. With the awareness that the world is still full of unnoticed poetry. Kiarostami's camera did not merely record life. It waited for life to reveal itself. That is why he remains not only a master filmmaker, but the poet behind the camera.