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Abbas Kiarostami

Called the grandfather of the Iranian New Wave of Cinema, director Abbas Kiarostami drew comparisons to Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, and no less a personage than Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa considered him the rightful heir to Satyajit Ray's mantle as the greatest practitioner of social realist filmmaking. His pictures depicted a country far different from the medieval Iran of the nightly newscast. Underneath the surface orthodoxy of the present regime beat the heart of Persia, a cosmopolitan culture of long-standing artistic and literary sophistication. Working in the tradition of Italian neo-realism, Kiarostami captured a lyrical but concrete feel for the particulars of place and visual atmosphere and elicited strikingly natural performances from non-actors, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary to serve a simple, elegant painterly direction that elevated his stories to the level of poetic allegory. From his international breakthrough "A Taste of Cherry" (1997) through later works including "The Wind Will Carry Us" (1999) and "Certified Copy" (2010), Kiarostami redefined not only Iranian cinema, but how western audiences viewed his homeland. Abbas Kiarostami died on July 4, 2016 in Paris at the age of 76.