Abbas Kiarostami Retrospective. The Magic of the Digital

An unnamed woman played by Iranian artist and actress Mania Akbari drives a taxi in Tehran. Her passengers are her relatives as well as random clients: her son, who accuses her of selfishness because of her divorce; her sister, who is more patient in marriage yet is also having trouble with her child; a senior lady who prays in a mausoleum three times a day; and a young woman whose fiancé is unsure about their wedding. Ten taxi passengers represent polar worldviews—from devout religiosity to cynical, practical wisdom, and, without noticing, the taxi driver assimilates their ideas, changes herself, and changes her fellow travelers. 

In the documentary 10 on Ten (2004)—a lesson, a manifesto and a master-class—Abbas Kiarostami spends ninety minutes driving in the mountains outside Tehran where he had filmed his Taste of Cherry (1997), speaks about the making of Ten (2002)—his first feature shot entirely on digital cameras—and explains his approach to filmmaking. This little-known documentary, which is very important for understanding Kiarostami, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

Five shots, averaging about ten minutes each, capture several bodies of water at different times of the day. A piece of wood drifts away and then approaches the seashore during a powerful tide. Four elderly men gather on the shore and talk while watching the sea. Dogs frolic by the water during the morning calm. A long caravan of ducks passes through the same place during different times of the day. The moon floods the night pond until the onset of dawn. Abbas Kiarostami’s homage to his favorite director, the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, was screened out of competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

Invited by the UN, in 2000 Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Uganda to make a film about the Women’s Effort to Rescue Orphans, an initiative launched in response to disasters leaving more than two million Ugandan children without parents. During his first, ten-day-long research trip, he filmed about twenty hours of video diary on a digital camera, documenting not only the suffering and death caused by the civil war and AIDS and malaria epidemics but also the joyful faces of kids who saw the camera for the first time. After returning to Iran, Kiarostami edited this rough footage into a film, thinking that he would never again get an opportunity to record a more natural reaction from his protagonists. The emotional and self-reflective picture premiered out of competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.