The most acclaimed and influential of Iran’s major filmmakers, Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) has graced the world with his humanity and imagination throughout a nearly five-decade career. Often applying a deft philosophical touch to simple issues and excavating deeper truths about life with bold experiments, Kiarostami’s cinema invokes introspection and greater possibilities for his audience, allowing each of us to correspond his films to our own worlds with new understandings.

Join Professor Hossein Khosrowjah as he explores the concept of truth in Kiarostami’s body of work. The talk will be moderated by Viknesh Kobinathan, programmer at the Asian Film Archive.  This discussion will stream live online on AFA’s Facebook and Youtube channels on Thursday, 26 August 2021 at 7pm SGT.

About the Talk

Abbas Kiarostami is universally recognised as a realist filmmaker to the extent that – properly or improperly – his cinema has been compared to Italian Neorealism. At the same time, in several interviews and published articles, Kiarostami has emphasised the role and insistence of the lie, as the only way of getting to the truth. What kind of truth and realist principles rely on lies? This talk will explore how films of Abbas Kiarostami navigate what philosopher Henry Corbin calls Mundus Imaginali, or the imaginal world, looking at the way in which many of his films withdraw the expected image to remind the viewer of the intermediary role of the image as the link between language and truth.

About the Speaker

Hossein Khosrowjah is a Visiting Professor of Art and Art History at Saint Mary’s College of California (SMC-CA). He has taught a wide range of film studies, art history, and visual and cultural studies courses at SMC-CA and other universities and colleges. His essays and reviews on a broad range of topics from film history to exilic autobiography to the history of American higher education have been published in film and cultural studies journals. He is co-editor of the 2011 Arab Studies Quarterly special issue on academic freedom. His book on Abbas Kiarostami titled, The Singular Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing later this year.

This event is presented as part of AFA’s Retrospective: Abbas Kiarostami programme