Abbas Kiarostami's Early Shorts and Features on Criterion Blu-ray

I have written a long essay to accompany a Criterion three-disc set featuring the early work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, produced between 1970 and 1989. This release relaunches the Eclipse series for the home video label, with Imogen Sara Smith serving as the series new editor. 

All of the titles have been restored in 2K by the renowned Bologna-based film restoration laboratory, L’Immagine Ritrovata. 

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Long before he became one of the most renowned artists in world cinema, the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami began his cinematic career at Tehran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (a.k.a. Kanoon), where he honed his distinctive style and themes. During his first decades as a filmmaker, Kiarostami moved freely among documentary, narrative, and even animation, and between joyous short films made for children and subtle works exploring the struggles of adolescents. Often using the classroom as a laboratory, he probed social and political tensions in Iranian society during the turbulent years before and after the 1979 revolution. Spanning his very first short, Bread and Alley (which the director called the “mother of all my films”); other underseen early revelations, like Experience and The Traveler; and nonfiction masterpieces such as Homework, the graceful, warm, and playful works collected here find moments of transcendent poetry within everyday life, and use deceptively simple premises to express universal truths about the human condition.