Abbas Kiarostami, 1940-2016

The death has been announced of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who died in Paris yesterday at the age of 76.

Kiarostami made quite a few films, but in the west he'd probably be best known for one, A Taste of Cherry, which deals with a man who is looking for somebody to bury his body beneath a cherry tree after he commits suicide. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and has already shown up several times in TCM's Imports in the overnight slot between Sunday and Monday.

Kiarostami's films are influenced by the fact that, unlike many of his colleagues, he remained in Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, therefore having to deal with the censorship from the new regime. Kiarostami, for his part, said that he believed his movies would never have been quite as good had he left Iran.

I knew I should have DVRed A Taste of Cherry the last time it was on a few months back.