Ten years have passed since he left, and yet we still haven’t grown used to his absence. A man who wielded his camera like his eyes and cast a gaze kinder than poetry upon the world—Abbas Kiarostami has not been among us for a decade now. He left with the same quiet grace with which he lived. But how tragic that he left unjustly, in vain, and in silence—in a foreign land, while galaxies of images, seen as only he could see them, still swirled in his mind; with poems yet to be written, and films left unmade.
For ten years now, the trees in his frames have stood alone. The roads are without travelers, and the windows long for his framing, wandering in his absence. The ache of missing him falls upon our hearts like sudden spring rain—relentless and uninvited. In his absence, our cinema has shed its skin, but his dreams have not forgotten him. Even now, a child still waits under the mulberry tree for the teacher to return. Or a man, in an olive grove, searches the silent eyes of a woman for traces of love.
Abbas himself once said: “Filmmaking is seeing with the eyes, understanding with the heart, and narrating with the soul.”
And he also said: “Reality is not always what is seen; sometimes truth hides behind the curtain of silence.”
But who could have known his own silence would come so soon, so without reason, so without goodbye?
He left us with unfinished dreams, with incomplete sketches, with 24 Frames—a cry of cinema’s helplessness in the face of death.
Abbas Kiarostami was more than a director; he was the poet of silences, the painter of shadows, the healer of human wounds. His cinema was like a human being who walked gently, breathed softly, and thought deeply.
…And now, it’s been ten years since Iranian and world cinema lost one of its last true storytellers.
If only death had been more patient.
If only it had learned from him how to wait, how to look, and how to live the world more lovingly—without needing to speak.
But he left, and with him took secrets that only the silence of empty scenes now reminds us of from time to time.
Ten years have gone by, and we are still searching for that gaze that gave meaning to the image.
It feels like he left just yesterday—and yet it feels like we relive his departure every single day.
Because he planted a tree that grows silently in the wind…
