The Long & Winding Road: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami

Overview

For four decades, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami explored his homeland — and sometimes the world as well — through a deeply thoughtful, probing and humanist lens. His features don't simply peer on at people and the places they call home; the late, great director's films truly see both his characters and the spaces they inhabit. And when he passed away in 2016, he left cinema with an exquisite body of work.

This year, Sydney Film Festival and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image are teaming up to pay tribute to the inimitable auteur, in the sixth of their collaborations to-date. Thanks to a retrospective season called The Long & Winding Road: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami, the two organisations will screen eight of Kiarostami's features and three of his shorts — and gems abound across the lineup.

In Sydney, the program will play during SFF — so, between Wednesday, August 18–Sunday, August 29 at a variety of Sydney cinemas — and spans early works, award-winners and seminal Iranian features all-round. Among the highlights: Kiarostami's debut The Traveler, about a boy who desperately wants to attend a soccer match; Close-Up, which blends fiction and documentary; Ten, his snapshot of the lives of contemporary Iranian women; and Taste of Cherry, the first Iranian film to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.