Locarno International Film Festival (International reception)

Held annually in Locarno, Switzerland. In 1989, Where is the Friend's House? was screened there in competition (despite having been produced almost 2 years earlier) and won the Bronze Leopard, which caused it and its director Abbas Kiarostami to attract global interest from specialist film magazines for the first time. This screening is now seen as a key moment both for the path of Kiarostami's career and for the fate of the New Iranian cinema too.

Iranian Cinema Retrospective at Locarno 1995: "Thanks to the indefatigable energy and enthusiasm of Marco Muller, at the time the director of the festival, Iranian cinema in general and Kiarostami's in particular received the most enthusiastic global audience that it always deserved but had never attained. Over the course of ten days some thirty Iranian films were shown. In addition to a complete retrospective of Kiarostami's cinema, the festival also included an exclusive section on Iranian women filmmakers, ranging from Forugh Farrokhzad's The House Is Black to Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's The Blue-Veiled. Also screened were Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Salaam Cinema (1994) and Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon (1995). In the long run, and after the initial shocks of this phenomenal exposure had disappeared, the presence of this worldwide audience for Iranian cinema had a catalytic effect on the rest of its history, which was soon to unfold." [Dabashi M&M, 296-7]

In Le Monde, August 4th 1995, the film critic Jean-Michel Frodon wrote about this retrospective and about Kiarostami in particularly, championing his films, and fully encapsulating the significance of the event. Dabashi writes:

Frodon's piece in Le Monde was subtitled with the provocative question: "How can one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers be from an Islamic Republic?" Frodon was quick and accurate in recognizing the connection between the simplicity of Kiarostami's cinematic aesthetic and the particular problems of cultural production in an Islamic Republic. Kiarostami's "aesthetic and civic ambitions," Frodon noted, are circumscribed by the fact that he has to operate "in the particularly constraining and complex context of the Islamic Republic." In the same vein, he also recognized the ambivalence of the officials of the Islamic Republic vis-avis the success and reputation of Kiarostami abroad. Frodon accurately analyzed that ambivalence as "the mixture of suspicion toward the artists and the pride of being admired by foreigners and the diplomatic use to which they can put this [positive] image."