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21c Museum Foundation and the Louisville Film Society Present Taste of Cherry
by Abbas Kiarostami
Tuesday January 15, 2008, 7pm and 9pm
Atrium Gallery
The event is free and open to the public
The entire program is about 95 mins. All films will be screened on 16mm prints.
Synopsis
A sublime and deceptively simple parable, Abbas Kiarostami's Palme d'Or winner follows
a middle-aged man who has decided to end his life. Driving through the hilly outskirts
of Tehran in search of someone who will bury him if he succeeds or rescue him if
he fails, he meets an assortment of different characters, each with their own reason
to turn down the task.
Voting "Taste of Cherry" the best film of the year in the international edition
of Time magazine, Richard Corliss wrote: "The film's artful simplicity, its respect
for each speaker's beliefs, its refusal to sentimentalize: all underline the director's
strategy of art. Let the rest of the film world ride a rocket to excess; Kiarostami
will find a quiet place and listen to a man's heart, right up until it stops beating.
And then he will listen some more." © (Zeitgeist Films Ltd.)
Kiarostami accepting a lifetime achievement award from Martin Scorsese in Marrakech
International Film Festival.
About Abbas Kiorastami
Though Kiarostami emerged in the West as a major filmmaker in the early '90s--with
films like Close-Up and Through the Olive Trees--he had already been making films
in Iran for two decades. Born on June 22nd 1940 in Tehran, Kiarostami was interested
in the arts from an early age. In 1969--the year that saw the birth of the Iranian
New Wave with Dariush Mehrjui's seminal film "The Cow" Kiarostami helped to set
up a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children
and Young Adults. The department's debut production was Kiarostami's own first film,
the twelve-minute Bread and Alley, a charming, neo-realist gem about a small boy's
perilous walk home from school. The department would go on to become one of Iran's
most famous film studios, producing not only Kiarostami's films, but also such modern
Iranian classics as The Runner and Bashu, the Little Stranger.
In the 28 years since BREAD AND ALLEY, Kiarostami has made more than 20 films, including
fiction features, educational shorts, feature-length documentaries, and a series
of films for television. He has also written screenplays for other directors, most
notably The WHITE BALLOON, for his former assistant Jafar Panahi.
But it was not until the late ‘80s that his films began to be shown outside Iran.
AND LIFE GOES ON (1992) the first of Kiarostami’s films to be shown at the New York
Film Festival and THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES (1994), the last two parts of what has
become known as the Earthquake Trilogy (started with WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOME?
in 1987) were the films that made Kiarostami’s reputation in the West. In 1996 he
was honored with a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York,
and in 1997 he came to the Cannes Film Festival at the eleventh hour with TASTE
OF CHERRY, only to walk away with the grand prize, becoming the first Iranian director
ever to win the Palme d’Or.
In 1999 Kiarostami won the Special Jury Prize for THE WIND WILL CARRY US and in
2000, at the request of the United Nations’ International Fund for Agricultural
Development, he travelled to Uganda to make the documentary ABC Africa, his first
film shot on digital video. In 2002 he premiered his newest film, TEN, at Cannes.
Kiarostami is also a noted photographer and poet. A bilingual collection of more
than 200 of his poems “Walking with the Wind” was recently published by Harvard
University Press.