Image courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

Screening presented in partnership with Calgary Cinematheque's series on Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) follows journalist Behzad and a camera crew sent to a remote Kurdish village, where they are to wait for the death of a hundred-year-old woman so that they can subsequently film a traditional funeral ceremony.

Runtime: 1 h 58 min

About the Filmmaker

Filmmaker, poet, and photographer Abbas Kiarostami was born in 1940 in the Iranian capital of Tehran. He began making films in the 1970s, in the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, working primarily as a documentarian. From early on, Kiarostami’s films had a special focus on children, with whom he would develop an effective and idiosyncratic manner of working. A turn to narrative fiction films in the 1980s, first with Where is the Friend’s House? (1987), the first film in his newly restored Koker Trilogy, and then Close-Up (1990), a fiction-documentary hybrid, would be the beginning of the director’s remarkable ascent to international prominence. His focus on real people and locations, a product of his documentary background, has earned comparisons to the Italian Neorealist masters of the immediate postwar period, but his work is also suffused with elements adopted from Persian poetry and art. With our Masters: Abbas Kiarostami series, Calgary Cinematheque highlights five universally humanistic works from the filmmaker’s rich cinematic legacy.