By Babak Dehghanpisheh<\/p>\n
BEIRUT (Reuters) \u2013 Abbas Kiarostami, the writer-director who showed that Iranian cinema was one of the most original and emotionally engaging in the world, died in Paris on Monday from complications related to cancer, according to Iranian state media. He was 76.<\/p>\n
Part of a new wave of Iranian cinema that started in the 1960s and known for realist stories focused on the lives of ordinary people, Kiarostami was one of the few film makers to stay and prosper in Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution.<\/p>\n
Despite their very local, Iranian themes, his movies struck a chord with global audiences, and Kiarostami won the Palmes d\u2019Or at Cannes in 1997 for \u201cTaste of Cherry\u201d, about a middle-aged Iranian man planning to commit suicide and looking for someone to bury him when he is dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is peculiar about his art is that he\u2019s both a rootedly Iranian artist in terms of his landscape, his urban sensibilities, his cinematography,\u201d said Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian Studies at New York\u2019s Columbia University.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he\u2019s also managed to raise those Iranian aspects to moments of universality.\u201d<\/p>\n
American director Martin Scorsese said of his work: \u201cKiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born in Tehran in 1940, Kiarostami studied at the School of Fine Arts at Tehran University. His first foray into video was making commercials for Iranian TV.<\/p>\n
After the 1979 revolution that ousted Iran\u2019s monarchy and ushered in an Islamist system of government, Kiarostami chose to stay while many artists and writers fled the country.<\/p>\n
His own films, which often centered around children or poorer Iranians living in rural areas, were never seen as overtly political, but some of the screenplays he wrote for his protege Jafar Panahi were.<\/p>\n
Panahi\u2019s 2003 movie \u201cCrimson Gold\u201d, the tragi-comic portrayal of a pizza delivery man humiliated by his lowly social position in Tehran, a city divided by class and money, was seen as critical of the Islamic Republic and was banned in Iran.<\/p>\n
Kiarostami leaves two sons, Ahmad and Bahman.<\/p>\n
(This version of the story has been refiled to change dateline to BEIRUT, pvs PARIS)<\/p>\n
(Editing by Robin Pomeroy, Larry King)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Babak Dehghanpisheh BEIRUT (Reuters) \u2013 Abbas Kiarostami, the writer-director who showed that Iranian cinema was one of the most original and emotionally engaging in the world, died in Paris on Monday from complications related to cancer, according to Iranian state media. He was 76. Part of a new wave of Iranian cinema that started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}