Called the grandfather of the Iranian New Wave of Cinema, director Abbas Kiarostami has drawn comparisons to Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, and no less a personage than Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa considers him the rightful heir to Satyajit Ray's mantle as the greatest living practitioner of social realist filmmaking. His pictures depict a country far different from the medieval Iran of the nightly newscast. Underneath the surface orthodoxy of the present regime beats the heart of Persia--a cosmopolitan culture of long-standing artistic and literary
