ERBIL, Kurdistan Region— The celebrated Iranian movie director Abbas Kiarostami died Monday at age 76 in Paris, where he had traveled to receive treatment for his cancer. Kiarostami’s acclaimed 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us has been hailed as an artistic masterpiece about Kurdish lives in the Middle East. "He changed the view of the world and Iran about the Kurds with his The Wind Will Carry Us," Bahman Ghobadi, a Kurdish director mentored by Kiarostami, said in a statement on Tuesday. "This was the most detailed movie so far made about the Kurds," Ghobadi added. The film contrasted rural and urban views on the dignity of labor and addressed themes of gender equality and the benefits of progress in a remote Kurdish village. Kiarostami was known for his minimalist movies such as the critically acclaimed 1997 movie Taste of Cherry, which tells the story of a middle-aged man driving across Tehran in search of someone who will bury him after he has died. That movie won Kiarostami the highest prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or, making him the only Iranian director to date to win that prestigious prize. Taste of Cherry also won him the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Language film. His most radically minimalist work of film was the 2002 movie Ten which was simply about a woman who drove around in a car giving lifts to different passengers. The 1990 film Close-Up also helped increase the recognition of the Iranian director in the West, it is based on the real life story of a man who impersonated a film-maker and conned his family into believing they would star in it and starred those involved playing themselves. Kiarostami had a four-decade long career; he influenced other movie-makers, notably Martin Scorsese who was friends with him for the last 15 years of his life. In a statement to AP Scorsese said that Kiarostami, "was a very special human being: quiet, elegant, modest, articulate and quite observant. I don’t think he missed anything. Our paths crossed too seldom, and I was always glad when they did. He was a true gentleman and, truly, one of our great artists." Relations between Kiarostami and the younger Ghobadi deteriorated in 2009 after Kiarostami criticized his protégé for making films outside Iran, in spite of this Ghobadi’s works are believed to be heavily influenced by his mentor’s New Wave in Iranian Cinema movement, which is captured in most of Ghobadi’s much-admired Kurdish films. "If Bahman Ghobadi thinks there are better circumstances for creating movies outside of Iran, I congratulate him. But for me, personally, I don’t believe in leaving Iran. The place I can sleep comfortably is my home," Kiarostami was widely quoted by the Iranian media after Ghobadi's decision to leave the country for good in late 2008. Ghobadi was assistant director on Kiarostami’s film The Wind Will Carry Us. "What ever the Iranian cinema has today, it has achieved through the great Abbas Kiarostami," Ghobadi wrote Tuesday in a statement on his Facebook page.
