When Kiarostami becomes orchestra conductor

A brand new teaser for ‘Kiarostami and His Missing Cane’ has been unveiled along with commentary from the director.

On Kiarostami’s appearance in the teaser, director Mahmoud-Reza Sani said, “While holding a film workshop in Barcelona in March 2015, the director was staying on the second floor of an old house with a balcony overlooking a narrow alley that led to the sea. He loved the sea and anything relating to it, and after seeing the beautiful coast of Barcelona, he decided to dedicate the subject of the workshop to it.”

“We would walk the distance between his residence and the coast every day with his students,” Sani said, adding, “As he took strides along the beach, he would share the various stories and ideas that he constantly developed from his surroundings, and gave us the permission to work on any of them as we wished.”

Sani talked about Kiarostami’s love for Cuba, stating that the filmmaker would “constantly ask about the country.”

“He loved the country and loved their music even more,” the director said, adding, “one day as we were heading to the beach, we ran into a band of Cuban musicians who were staying in Barcelona. They played with a certain passion that was characteristic of musicians from the Caribbean region, to the point that we did not realize how quickly an hour passed by.”

Kiarostami requested that Sani exchange numbers with the musicians and told him to call them the very next morning and that these musicians did not belong in the streets with buildings and urban traffic in the background. “At that point, I knew he had something in mind,” the director recalled.

Upon calling the musicians the next morning, Sani and Kiarostami would meet up with them and they would head towards the coast. Once there, the late filmmaker had the band members take their positions with their backs towards the sea.

“I got the camera ready and they all looked at each other and began singing,” Sani stated, noting, “We were their only audience in the beginning, but after an hour, you couldn’t count the number of people in the crowd. They sang, sang, and sang, telling stories about far away, the other side of the sea, and their homeland. They never realized, however, that the conductor of the best orchestra they had performed to date was Kiarostami.”

‘Kiarostami and His Missing Cane’ is a documentary that takes the viewer into the world of the late filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami during a period when he held workshops on filmmaking outside of Iran.

MB/AG