Can't believe no one posted this yet. It's been a rough couple days for great directors.

http://www.thewrap.com/abbas-kiarost...or-dies-at-76/

Damn! He was one of the greats. I remember the first time I saw Taste of Cherry being blown away.

Never heard of the guy until I saw Taste of Cherry at the theater I worked at. I was slowly getting into foreign and art films since that's what we usually played there. I found the film incredibly moving, and sought out other movies of his after. Certified Copy was also another really good one, and the Criterion disc is really good. This is a pretty big loss, especially for Middle Eastern cinema. RIP.

Certified Copy was great.

I saw Where is my Friend's House in 2002- great movie, small scale. Heard great things about the rest of his filmography but haven't checked it out yet.

I didn't know he was so old. Seemed younger. Such a great filmmaker. At the time I was really getting into cinema studies he was the headiest, most opaque, most experimental filmmaker working. In the mid-90's his stuff was really hard to see. Taste of Cherry was the only thing on DVD I think. I had to rely mostly on books. LA County Museum of Art did a retrospective around 2001 and I got to see all the key works. They showed the Trilogy and Close Up all in 35 mm. I think Life and Nothing More is among the best films ever made. That last shot. So great. He was the king of the last shot. They were often so good they completely redefined what had come before.

He was also perhaps the greatest photographer of cars. He used them so masterfully. The Range Rover in Taste of Cherry might be my favorite use of a car in film. What it looked like, and how it was driven and where, told you more about the main character than anything else in the film.