RIP Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016)

The world just lost another master artist yesterday, after the recent passing of Michael Cimino and Elie Wiesel. Abbas Kiarostami has passed away after a battle with gastrointestinal cancer.

Kiarostami's blended fiction and non-fiction during his over forty year career in film. One of the most prominent Iranian filmmakers, he had been a mainstay of the Cannes Film Festival, jurying multiple times and winning the Palme d'Or in 1997 for Taste of Cherry. His most recent films Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love ventured out of Iran, but it's his homegrown meditations on death like Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us are what instantly come to mind on this sad news.

Kiarostami wasn't just a film artist but a poet as well, though poetic language heightened much of his film work. His films were soulfully awake and fiercely personal - Cherry being the brusing and enlightening standout, with Copy's existentialism winning him his newest fans. Just last week, he had been included on the Academy's list of newly invited members. You can catch up with many of his films on Hulu.

What was your favorite Kiarostami film?

Team Top Ten: The Best Cannes Winners of All Time

Amir here, to bring you this month’s edition of Team Top Ten, a monthly poll by all of our contributing team at The Film Experience. Cinephiles all around the world turn their attention to the south of France in May as the most prestigious film festival in the world gets underway in Cannes.

The festival’s history is a rich one, full of interesting cinematic and political narratives. It’s an event that has celebrated the best in cinema and operated as a launching pad for emerging artists as much as it has played games of politics and festival world favouritism. Still, when all is said and done, the list of Palme d’Or winners can rival any list of the best films ever made.

With this year’s edition of the festival just about to begin, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the past and choose our Top Ten Favourite Cannes Winners of All Time. For this poll, we’ve excluded the first two editions of the festival (1939, retroactively awarded to Union Pacific, and 1946, when the top prize was shared between 11 films.)

There is really no easy way to select the cream of the crop here, because these films are already... well, the cream of the crop. Consider the eight films that finished behind our top dozen: Pulp Fiction; Dancer in the Dark; Viridiana; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Farewell My Concubine; Secrets & Lies; The Tree of Life; The Pianist. Not to mention masterpieces like Black Orpheus, Wages of Fear and Rosetta that placed outside the top 20. The point is that this is the highest echelon of films awards so the standards are high and margins are slim. Some of you will surely disagree with our ranking, but we welcome that. Let us know what you think in the comments.

THE BEST CANNES WINNERS OF ALL TIME
a non-definitive poll which begins with a three-way tie for tenth

10= La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)

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