Open to interpretation

When informed of his packed media interview schedule in Hong Kong, Abbas Kiarostami was not pleased. Given his stature as an international art house cinema titan, he could easily have thrown a tantrum and walked out. But that's not his style. The Iranian auteur-artist has always been cool - and not only because he's always wearing shades which are for his eyes' hyper-sensitivity to light (the ultimate irony for a filmmaker).

Celebrated as Iran's leading director, writer, photographer and poet for close to 40 years, Kiarostami won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997 for Taste of Cherry. In 1999, his follow-up film The Wind Will Carry Us garnered the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the Venice Film Festival.

Known for often using children and non-actors, his prosaic, almost documentary style defies Hollywood conventions. It's not uncommon for people in his films to have entire conversations while driving a car or to discuss life and death with someone off screen in one long continuous take.

The late Roger Ebert once described Taste of Cherry - in which a man drives around Tehran and its countryside seeking help to commit suicide - as "excruciatingly boring". But that's a minority view; most serious critics consider Kiarostami's works as masterpieces in the way they explore big philosophical issues through simple realistic narrative.

"My first intention was to be a painter," the 72-year-old Kiarostami recalls. "I passed the entrance test for the Liberal Arts University but it took me 13 years to graduate from a four-year programme because I couldn't paint. My mind was more advanced than my hands. Perhaps that's why I moved to cinema and filmmaking. My success in film and photography is the result of my failure in painting."

Growing up, the Tehran-born filmmaker was influenced by Italian neo-realist cinema. But his penchant for social realism has never veered into political storytelling, not even at the height of the Iranian revolution, when he was one of the few artists to stay.