a curious Yankee in Europe's court

Yesterday, following a link to a link to a link in classic surfing style, I spotted news of an upcoming exhibition in Milan of Abbas Kiarostami’s celebrated “Snow White” series. It’s a collection of b&w photos of trees and snow that the Iranian filmmaker has taken over the years since 1978. The exhibition is at Ciocca Arte Contemporanea museum. The show opens this week on April 5 and will run through May 31.

A couple of years ago, a friend who writes about film invited me to a special screening of Kiarostami’s just-released film Tickets (2005). The event, for young Italian film and acting students, was held on a sound stage at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Kiarostami was present and, following the screening, took questions from the audience. He had the confidence and world weary attitude of a veteran master filmmaker at the top of his profession, but he truly was kindness itself, I remember, in the patient and close attention he gave to the students and their never-ending queries.

In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle online last year featuring an interview with Kiarostami, reporter Jonathan Curiel wrote this intro of the revered filmmaker:

In a critics’ poll taken a few years ago by Sight & Sound magazine, Abbas Kiarostami was ranked the fourth most important filmmaker of modern times — behind Wong Kar-Wai (No. 3), Krzysztof Kieslowski (No. 2) and Martin Scorsese. Asked about Kiarostami, Scorsese once said, “Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema.” (“Kiarostami/Iranian director’s work from cinema to photos on display in Berkeley retrospective exhibition” by Jonathan Curiel, SFGATE, July 9, 2007)

Kiarostami made the short video above, Romeo, as part of a celebration of the 60th anniversary last year of the Cannes Film Festival. He was among a group of thirty-five international auteurs invited to make a three-minute vignette on the “theme of cinema” for the celebratory occasion.

You can see an interview with Kiarostami in which he talks about the video here (“To Each His Own Cinema Interviews,” At The Movies website).