The room was abuzz for an Abbas Kiarostami entrance. I sat terrified, hoping, but knowing what others didn't—that he was sick, and might not come. Festival head Peter Scarlet finally strode to the front and broke the bad news. But Kiarostami had left three short films for us, so "Have a good screening." I stood up, feeling broken, and began to walk out, then turned and retook my seat. A new film by Kiarostami, even if it's only a few minutes long, is always worth watching.

Not that Rain, the first short, is new, per se. It's made up of a series of photographs that were previously presented at a Pompidou Centre exhibition. "I would drive in the rain with one hand on the wheel, and take pictures with the other," he has explained. The film shows images of trees melting and waving, water covering the window. And that's it.

Yet the film is also more than its images. After a series of complex, multi-character masterpieces like Close-Up and The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami spent much of the past decade as a minimalist filmmaker, ignoring editing and camera movement to simply focus on the images in front of him. The many people who complained that he had lost his gifts as a filmmaker ignored how he had returned to his original gifts as a photographer and poet. Kiarostami's poems, usually no more than three to four lines each, continue just long enough to capture the poet's wonder at an image—the intricacy of a spider's web, or the whiteness of falling snow. His willingness to simply look was in fact one of the things that then made him a great filmmaker. Most movies don't linger on falling leaves or rolling spray cans, let alone on conversation. From the beginning Kiarostami's movies refreshed the world by encouraging the viewer to look at it. Continue Reading »