Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami is an Iranian director and taxi driver who is internationally known for shooting his own customers if they talk too much. Although considered wanted by Iranian legal authorities since 1970, Kiarostami has been involved in over forty shooting incidents, all of them captured by traffic enforcement cameras. He is considered the most wanted fugitive in Iran since the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Kiarostami notoriously began his career by shooting a little boy and his dog. Several interpretations were suggested for that act, one of them is that Kiarostami became jealous as Iran joined the race of nuclear weapons and Little Boy was declared most wanted by Iranian police. He still enjoys shooting children, including orphans from Uganda.
Many of Kiarostami's shootings begin as he starts a conversation with one of his most boring passengers, thus forcing the increased involvement of the passenger in the shooting. They start conversing on different issues like the place of women in Iranian society, while Kiarostami starts shooting the passenger. In recent years, it becomes more and more unclear who is the Kiarostami and who is the passenger, as the conversations become much more minimalistic. Sometimes the passenger starts believing he is the Kiarostami and sometimes the Kiarostami starts believing he is directing a movie, only he is not sure who's directing it, him or the passenger. This made the Iranian authorities very confused, to a point where even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and King Xerxes became suspects, much more so with the increased use of contemporary Iranian poetry by Kiarostami himself:
| “ | We are confident that the Islamic logic, culture, and discourse can prove their superiority in all fields over all schools of thought and theories. You Greeks take pride in your logic. I suggest you employ it. Consider the beautiful land you so vigorously defend. Picture it reduced to ash at my whim! Consider the fate of your women! | ” |
Lately, Kiarostami began to break into the Iranian police offices and digitally alter his own shots. This has been known as The Wind Will Carry Us sting, and created even further confusionism between the passenger and his Kiarostamis. Moreover, Kiarostami developed a technique to convince one of his passengers that he is the
Kiarostami who pictures himself as a passenger and the other is a passenger who pictures himself as a Kiarostami, none of this made the camera believe it is a taxi, or vice versa. Kiarostami is also known for offering a new definition to the concept of shooting. Some of the shootings of Kiarostami shoot a passenger end with a shooting of Kiarostami shooting himself, a passenger, or a passenger shooting Kiarostami while shooting is in the progress.
Throughout his career, Kiarostami's work, often called Kiarostamian Cinema, has influenced many Hollywood filmmakers. American answers to Kiarostami are sometimes referred to as Keirastamian or Keanustamian films. Much like Kiarostami's shootings, Keanu Reeves's films are known for their treatment of the victory of the human spirit, no matter how boring the human might be.
