Lessons with Kiarostami

Edited by Paul Cronin
Foreword by Mike Leigh

Throughout the last two decades of his life, Abbas Kiarostami — the Iranian film director of Where is the Friend’s House?, Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, Close Up, A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love — appeared regularly at festivals and on campuses, where he worked closely for several days at a time with young filmmakers, shepherding them and their projects, sending them out with cameras, then screening and discussing the results.

Fashioned from notes made over a period of nearly ten years at several of these workshops, Lessons with Kiarostami is a distillation of Kiarostami’s filmmaking techniques and working methods, and most importantly a series of practical guideposts for aspiring filmmakers. Not a traditional interview book or manual of filmmaking, still less a survey of Iranian cinema or study of Kiarostami’s films, the book — which documents a weeklong classroom meeting between teacher and students — is a distillation of his technique and working methods, an attempt to capture the essence of an occasionally elusive experience. Written in the first person, from Kiarostami’s point of view, and with his imprimatur, it details his artful approach to storytelling, his philosophy of life and feelings about the world around him. It is a poetics, a treatise on the creation and meaning of cinema that expresses Kiarostami’s aesthetic sensibility and recounts his orientation towards clarity.

Lessons with Kiarostami, which has been translated into several language, including Farsi, was published alongside bilingual volumes of Kiarostami’s original verse and his adaptations/selections from the Persian canon. These translations are collected together as In the Shadow of Trees. Here for a brochure about the Kiarostami project from Sticking Place Books.

Qui per la versione in lingua italiana.

Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) was one of Iran’s leading filmmakers who also published several books of photographs and poetry.

^{Lessons with Kiarostami (2015)
Paperback ISBN 978-1-942782-47-6 190 pp 5×8 inches, with b/w photographs
Hardback ISBN 978-1-942782-58-2 186 pp 5×8 inches, with b/w photographs}