Having graduated from the Academy of the Fine Arts in Teheran, Kiarostami's film career began in the area of graphic arts and advertising, after which he landed a job at the Institute for the intellectual development of children and adolescents, where he directed the department of cinema for many years. His first short film, The Bread and the Alley, was produced in 1970, while the debut of his first feature film dates back to 1974 with The Traveller. Yet it is only at the end of the following decade that Kiarostami, as was already mentioned, obtained the international recognition he deserved, and consequently contributed to the promotion of Iranian cinema in the world, largely unknown until then. In 1992, he won the "Rossellini Prize" in Cannes; with The Taste of Cherry he became joint winner of the "Palme d'Or" at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival; with The Wind Will Carry Us he obtained the "Grand Prix of the Jury" at the 1999 Film Festival of Venice.

However, above and beyond his awards, what counts is the prestige he acquired thanks to his unique style, his clear and painstaking reflection on reality and his mise-en-scene. From his very first films, what Kiarostami never ceased investigating, with increasing and impressive effectiveness, are his favourite themes: the relationship between cinema and life, the dialectic between documentaries and fiction, the foregone principles of life and the cinematographic scheme of death. Kiarostami is without a doubt one of the few modern filmmakers that incessantly questions himself on the very nature of the cinematographic devices and the process of filming. Regardless of the aesthetic value that this consideration might hold, the author seems to pay most attention to its intrinsically moral value. In reality, Kiarostami's trust in the power held by the movie camera is never separate from the question on its role, the effects it can produce on reality, and his responsibility as a filmmnaker. As Jean-Louis Nancy writes, "cinema, here, spells out with power and restraint, with grace and severity, a need to look and to make use of one's eyes - not a new problematic of representation that would come on top of previous ones having rightfully marked the history of film, but rather the axiomatics of a way of looking: here is the evident certainty of a cinematographic gaze regard for the world and its truth".

With the recent "discovery" of digital and its multiple applications (ABC Africa, Ten), this refection is no less important, but rather, on the contrary its seems to become even stronger and more radical. By abolishing, or even better, reducing the distance between reality and the cinematographic devices, Kiarostami's cinema becomes, to some extent, even more experimental, while his DVcam offers him more freedom to examine, with his habitual unrelenting human look, the birth of truth, emotion or the drama on a character's face. Or to test "the intrinsic power of image" when even the last intermediary between the person behind the movie camera and what is in front of it has disappeared. As in the unpublished collection The Lagoon and the Moon, where no human figure comes between Kiarostami's camera and the landscape and those things filmed.