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 sophistication. Working in the tradition of Italian neo-realism, Kiarostami captures a lyrical but concrete feel for the particulars of place and visual atmosphere and elicits strikingly natural performances from non-actors, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary to serve a simple, elegant painterly direction that elevates his stories to the level of poetic allegory.

The former graphic artist and illustrator accepted the invitation (offered partly because of his work designing children's books) to help found the cinema department of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, which would fund his early movies and provide Kiarostami with a stable artistic home. His immersion in films about kids proved particularly fortuitous in the wake of the jihad as the child's world remained an open and fertile ground for metaphor, in contrast to the restrictions placed on other areas of dramatic inquiry. Though his failing marriage ("a revolution going on in my house") precluded his fleeing the country during the revolution of 1978-79, Kiarostami could argue that weathering the storm made him a better filmmaker, and indeed the artists who stayed at home have produced, on the whole, better films than their contemporaries who emigrated.

Kiarostami's first dramatic short, "Bread and Alley" (1970), in which his young protagonist confronts a vicious dog in an alley, demonstrated the esthetic qualities that would distinguish his later films, although he claims naivete led him to choose the difficult subject matter, not realizing how many hours it would take to coax the appropriate reactions from the beast. Once the Islamic Republic decided that a productive, culturally responsible film industry offered more benefits than the reactionary practice of torching cinemas, Kiarostami made his third feature and first since the revolution, "Where Is the Friend's House?" (1987), a simple tale of a rural boy trying to return a friend's notebook after school in order to save him from punishment, encompassing universal geographies of childhood, school, fear and honor. At the time it was winning him fame at Western film festivals, he had no idea it was the cornerstone of the trilogy that would secure his reputation.

After an earthquake devastated the area where he shot "Where Is the Friend's House?", Kiarostami returned to the region in 1990 to ascertain if his young actors had survived. Tragically, they had not, but he turned this experience into the meditative, documentary-like fiction of "And Life Goes On" (1992), in which a director (played by an actor) and his son drive around the ravaged landscape searching for clues to the young boys' fate. In "Through the Olive Trees" (1994), Kiarostami recreated the making of "And Life Goes On" to serve as the backdrop to a tale of the unrequited love of two bit players, both victims of the quake. Playfully pointing up the artifice of the device, he has the actor portraying the behind-the-scenes director identify himself at the outset as the director, and later an assistant responding to a call from one of the actors brings water on to the set. Another scene shows the director shooting multiple takes, although that repetition enabled Kiarostami to get in an exchange where the Young Man is murmuring to the woman he loves, between the takes.

Kiarostami has also directed intriguing documentaries like "Case No 1, Case No 2" (1979), which so confounded officials of the new Islamic regime that they initially awarded it a prize before banning it, and "Homework" (1990), inspired by the difficulties his son was experiencing at school. His most famous documentary, "Close-Up" (1991), depicted the trial of a poor man (Sabzian) who had gained illicit entree into the upper classes by posing as the famous Iranian director Moshen Makhmalbaf. Kiarostami wryly blends in fiction, persuading Sabzian and the deceived family to reenact certain events that led to the arrest and arranging for the real Makhmalbaf to meet the pretender on the latter's release from prison. At one point the real Makhmalbaf visited the family to impress them in Sabzian's behalf, and the mother said to him when he was leaving: "Mr. Makhmalbaf, the other Mr. Makhmalbaf was more Makhmalbaf than you are." Kiarostami has never more brilliantly invoked his contention that "We can never get close to the truth except by lying."

Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry" (1997), a lyrical, sun-drenched existential meditation on suicide--an Islamic taboo--ran afoul of the Iranian government which nearly prevented its inclusion at Cannes. When it went on to win the Palme d'Or, the official government reaction was one of icy silence, although his faux pas at the award ceremony caused a scandal at home. In the heat of the moment, Kiarostami disregarded a code of fundamentalist Islamic behavior by kissing presenter Catherine Deneuve on the cheek. His films are not wildly successful in Iran, but he understands the breadth of his increasingly Western audience, saying "I'm happy that only a few people see my films, a select few. It is not realistic to expect this kind of cinema to attract a larger audience." In addition to his own films, Kiarostami wrote the screenplays for Alireza Raisian's "Safar/The Journey" and Jafar Panahi's "Le Ballon blanc/The White Balloon" (both 1995), the latter winning the Camera d'Or at Cannes.