On the films of Abbas Kiarostami and what his career reveals about cinema's relationship to Iran.

Kiarostami made films in Iran for the Islamic Republic's state film organization under significant constraints, and the constraints produced a formal vocabulary that is now recognized as among the most distinctive in world cinema.

The Koker Trilogy (Where Is the Friend's Home?, And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees) uses the same geography of northern Iran across three films made in response to the 1990 earthquake. The films layer reality and fiction in ways that became increasingly self-aware: the third film is about the filming of the second film.

Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us use the car as a formal container: a mobile space in which conversation can occur, in which a character can travel through landscape without committing to any destination, in which the camera can be both inside and outside the situation simultaneously.

Close-Up is the most formally radical of his films: a documentary about a man who impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, which includes reconstructed scenes performed by the actual participants. The distinction between documentary and fiction is not merely blurred — it's the film's subject.