Lessons With Kiarostami

Over the past two decades, Abbas Kiarostami - the Iranian film director of Where is the Friend's House?, Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, Close Up, A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love - has appeared regularly at festivals and on campuses, where he has worked closely for several days with young filmmakers, shepherding them and their projects, sending them out with cameras, then screening and discussing the results. Pieced together from notes made over a period of nearly ten years at several of these workshops, Lessons with Kiarostami is a distillation of Kiarostami's filmmaking techniques and working methods, and most importantly a series of practical guideposts for aspiring filmmakers.

Over the past two decades, Abbas Kiarostami - the Iranian film director of Where is the Friend's House?, Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, Close Up, A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Ten, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love - has appeared regularly at festivals and on campuses, where he has worked closely for several days with young filmmakers, shepherding them and their projects, sending them out with cameras, then screening and discussing the results. Pieced together from notes made over a period of nearly ten years at several of these workshops, Lessons with Kiarostami is a distillation of Kiarostami's filmmaking techniques and working methods, and most importantly a series of practical guideposts for aspiring filmmakers.

Abbas Kiarostami's films have taken their place alongside the masterworks of world cinema. Respected cinema historian Alberto Elena, using Iranian sources wherever possible, has written a comprehensive and instructive overview of Kiarostami's work.

For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university’s unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world’s attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion. With more than sixty essays from members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the Students’ Afro-American Society, faculty, undergraduates who opposed the protests, “outside agitators,” and members of the New York Police Department, A Time to Stir sheds light on the politics, passions, and ideals of the 1960s. Moving beyond accounts from the student movement’s white leadership, this book presents the perspectives of black students, who were grappling with their uneasy integration into a supposedly liberal campus, as well as the views of women, who began to question their second-class status within the protest movement and society at large. A Time to Stir also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. For many, the events at Columbia inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, while for others they signaled the beginning of the chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections present a nuanced and moving portrait that reflects the sense of possibility and excess that characterized the 1960s.

Between 2006 and 2011, Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami released his selections from and adaptations of four masters of Persian poetry: Nima (1895-1960), Hafez, Saadi and Rumi (all from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries). In 2015, shortly before his death, Kiarostami published two further volumes, the thematic anthology Night, his selections from a variety of classical and contemporary poets. These books are in addition to his three volumes of original verse: A Wolf on Watch (2005), With the Wind (2006) and Wind and Leaf (2011). In the Shadow of Trees brings together English translations of all these books.

Before his death in 2016, Abbas Kiarostami wrote or directed more than thirty films in a career that mirrored Iranian cinema's rise as an international force. His 1997 feature Taste of Cherry made him the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Critics' polls continue to place Close-Up (1990) and Through the Olive Trees (1994) among the masterpieces of world cinema. Yet Kiarostami's naturalistic impulses and winding complexity made him one of the most divisive--if influential--filmmakers of his time. In this expanded second edition, award-winning Iranian filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum renew their illuminating cross-cultural dialogue on Kiarostami's work. The pair chart the filmmaker's late-in-life turn toward art galleries, museums, still photography, and installations. They also bring their distinct but complementary perspectives to a new conversation on the experimental film Shirin. Finally, Rosenbaum offers an essay on watching Kiarostami at home while Saeed-Vafa conducts a deeply personal interview with the director on his career and his final feature, Like Someone in Love.

Oh dear. It seems that our furry, feathered, and finny friends have been afflicted with a bad case of the swearing disease! From foul-mouthed Fidos, to pissed-off Pollies, to fish that say "fuck!" the entire barnyard is in an uproar and it's getting out of hand. This miniature masterpiece combines comical and cute animal photos with captions that are sure to appall even the most adoring animal-lovers.

The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Liège-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers’ career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut as directors of fiction films in the late 1980s and early 1990s to their six major achievements from The Promise (1996) to The Kid with a Bike (2011), an oeuvre that includes two Golden Palms at the Cannes film festival, for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005). It argues that the ethical dimension of the Dardennes’ work complements rather than precludes their sustained expression of a fundamental political sensibility.