22 June, 1940 – 4 July, 2016
2016 has been a brutal, deadly bastard of a year, but nothing has hit me this hard: the great Abbas Kiarostami, director of such medium-defining masterworks as Where Is the Friend’s Home?, Close-Up, Life, and Nothing More, and Taste of Cherry, has died today.
The body of work Kiarostami leaves behind is one of the most humane and aesthetically profound in the history of cinema. As sad as this news surely is, it is a great privilege to be alive at a time when we can appreciate his extraordinary body of work in all its complexity and penetrating insight. I haven’t the capacity to properly honor of this titanic figure, one of the great filmmakers to have ever stepped behind a camera, and I can only offer up my unspeakable gratitude for how much I learned about the art form of cinema, and what it means to be human, from his beautiful, challenging, inexhaustible filmography.