Get reel: Abbas Kiarostami revisited

When Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami was in town recently, I told a friend about his films and how much I like them, citing Taste of Cherry as a particular favourite. The look on my friend's face, when she heard the title of that evocative drama, made me realise that she thought it had a sexual element to it.

That prompted me to laugh, and quickly let her know that that was far from the case. The Palme d'Or winner at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival is actually about a middle-aged man who goes on a long drive, during which he tries to convince strangers he meets to help him commit suicide.

Another Kiarostami work that left an impression on me was The Wind Will Carry Us. This has the kind of humanistic subject matter that more commercial filmmakers would steer clear of . The winner of three awards at the 1999 Venice Film Festival (including the grand special jury prize for its director), this drama, which has some comedy, centres on a Tehran engineer who goes to a faraway village built into the side of a mountain, to keep vigil for a dying relative.

Call me weird, but I first noticed the work because of the image on the cover of the VHS tape in my neighbourhood video store in Philadelphia, where I lived years ago. Because that particular landscape shot was so beautiful, I decided I should wait and view the film when I had the chance to do so on a big screen.

Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us were screened as part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society's HKIFF Cine Fan series in May. So positive must have been the response that they have been included in the HKIFF Cine Fan's "Abbas Kiarostami Revisited" selection of five films, which shows this month at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.

In an interview with the Post in June, the 73-year-old auteur spoke about having lost his enthusiasm for filmmaking in recent years. While I prefer his late 1990s efforts to more recent ones such as Shirin (2008), which I found conceptually interesting but not as hypnotic to watch, it would still be a shame if there won't be any more new Kiarostami films to view later down the road.