With a story that’s almost literally “ripped from the headlines,” Close-Up (1990) tells the real-life tale of a young working-class man named Hossein Sabzian who had impersonated legendary Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf in order to insinuate himself into the lives of the Ahankhahs, a middle-class family living in Northern Tehran.

The film in which Kiarostami’s Persian poetic sensibility is most foregrounded, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) follows journalist Behzad and a camera crew who have been sent to a remote Kurdish village where they are to wait for the death of a one-hundred-year-old woman so that they can subsequently film a traditional funeral ceremony.

In the final film in Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy, a stonemason cast in a film within the film romantically pursues a young woman, who is also cast in said film. Despite the fact that the family consider him an ill-suited match, the stonemason continues to pursue his romantic quarry, bringing forward elements of the fictional world and the filmic world as they cross-pollinate in mysterious ways.

And Life Goes On (1992) follows a film director and his son who journey through the country in the aftermath of a major earthquake in search of survivors, including some of the nonprofessionals who acted in Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987).

Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) tells the simple story of a schoolboy in Iran’s hinterlands who accidentally brings a friend’s notebook home and then tries desperately to locate the boy in a neighbouring town in order to return it.