The following introduction by critic Godfrey Cheshire—whose latest book is “In the Time of Kiarostami”—was recorded in 2022.

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1974 • Iran
Starring Hassan Darabi, Pare Gol Atashjameh

Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature focuses on a boy in a provincial city so avid to get to Tehran to see a soccer match that he’ll lie to adults and cheat other kids. A quest film that’s also a study of youthful...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1984 • Iran

Inspired by his work at Kanoon and his own sons’ schooling, the first of Abbas Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education looks in on a schoolyard of chanting, playful boys but mainly transpires in the office of a supervisor who has to deal w...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1987 • Iran

The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing KOKER TRILOGY takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of ...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1989 • Iran

In Abbas Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there. It emerges t...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1992 • Iran
Starring Farhad Kheradmand, Pouya Payvar, Hossein Rezai

In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that left fifty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his camera surveys not only devastation but also the teeming life in its wak...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2001 • Iran
Starring Abbas Kiarostami, Seifollah Samadian

In 2000, Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS. Wo...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1970 • Iran
Starring Reza Hashemi, Mehdi Shahravanfar

“The mother of all my films,” according to Abbas Kiarostami, starts out as a breezily observed anecdote about a boy wending his way home through Tehran alleys carrying a loaf of bread. Variations on both the boy...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1972 • Iran
Starring Sirous Hassanpour

Disciplined at school for breaking a window, a boy joins throngs of his schoolmates as they make a cacophonous exit into Tehran’s streets. He then briefly joins an impromptu soccer game but disrupts it by stealing the ball and...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1973 • Iran
Starring Parviz Naderi, Hossein Yarmohammadi, Andre Govalovish

Based on a story by Amir Naderi, who also cowrote the film, this slice of a fourteen-year-old boy’s life follows his efforts to fend for himself in the big city, working as a tea server and ...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1975 • Iran

The first of Abbas Kiarostami’s films made for, rather than about, children was an experiment in combining live action and animation, done in collaboration with animator Nafiseh Riahi. As two schoolboys watch animated views of animals’ actions—kangaroos...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1975 • Iran

This simple moral tale seems to prefigure WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE? Two young schoolboys, Dara and Nader, are friends until Dara returns Nader’s notebook torn and Nader retaliates in kind, setting off an escalating battle that leads to destruction of...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1976 • Iran
Starring Mohammad Fassih, Mehdi Nekoueï, Massoud Zand

In a trilevel shopping arcade, a teenage boy who works for a tailor is besieged by two other boys who want to borrow a new suit to wear on a social outing before it’s turned over to its owner. One of...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1976 • Iran

Ostensibly a film for children, this picture-book essay about the range of hues that brighten our world has the air of a delightfully playful formalistic exercise. As a narrator runs though the colors one by one, Abbas Kiarostami shows us where each app...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1977 • Iran

An assignment from Iran’s Ministry of Education, this documentary from the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty includes interviews with officials who predictably praise teaching as a sacred, noble, and honorable profession. The teachers who are also inter...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1979 • Iran
Starring Mehdi Azadbakht, Mohammadreza Barati, Hedayat Matin Daftari

Made in the spring of 1979, not long after the shah’s overthrow, this extraordinary film serves as a Rorschach blot for people in a revolutionary mindset. Abbas Kiarostami stages two v...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1980 • Iran

Though much of this film by Abbas Kiarostami is a straightforward lecture about dental hygiene delivered by a dentist facing the camera, it still manages to be persuasively Kiarostami-esque in its description of young Mohammad-Reza’s life at home and sc...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1981 • Iran

The first shot shows students descending a staircase in calm, orderly fashion, then the second details the same action as a chaotic rush. Separated by slates and director Abbas Kiarostami’s voice intoning, “Sound, camera,” subsequent sequences describe ...