During the 1990s, new filmmakers formed in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution took over from the filmmakers who in 1964 crystallised the New Wave, taking over the major European festival circuit. Locarno ‘95 presented in its official section up to two films from the Middle Eastern country – The White Balloon by Jafar Panahi and The Blue-Veiled by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad – and organised the first major retrospective of Abbas Kiarostami’s work. A month later, Venice announced Kiarostami’s participation in the Official Jury. The first communications with the Iranian exponent safeguarded in the San Sebastian Festival archive, two faxes addressed to the Orselina (Locarno) and Excelsior (Venice) hotels, begin with the selection of the film Safar by Alireza Raisian in the official competition in San Sebastian, in which Kiarostami appears as a scriptwriter.

His visit to the festival would take a year to take place because, as Kiarostami brings forward in his reply, the pre-production of his next film would force him to turn down the invitation of the then director of the festival, Diego Galán, who took advantage of his first letters to take an interest in his next project. As can be seen from subsequent correspondence with the Iranian critic Mamad Haghighat, the first face-to-face meeting between Galán and the filmmaker took place in Tehran in February 1996, within the framework of the Fajr International Film Festival (FIFF), held to this day during the anniversary dates of the ‘79 revolution. Haghighat, a contributor to the Arab festival, was also a critic and correspondent for the specialised magazine Film, the oldest film publication in post-revolutionary Iran, founded in 1982, and which welcomed among its rank theorists and filmmakers such as Kyomarth Pourahmad, Hamed Suleimanzadeh and Abbas Kiarostami himself, who would influence the future of Arab cinema with their postulates.

In his response to Galán’s thank you note, the Iranian critic lists several projects in production, including Kiarostami’s new film, Le voyage á l’aube, revealing that what would become one of his most acclaimed films, The Taste of Cherries (1997), had an earlier title: Journey to Dawn.

In the following months, with a fierce festival circuit immersed in a kind of space race in a bid for the coveted film, communication with Kiarostami and his collaborators got embroiled until the San Sebastian Festival contacted the director of festivals of the Farabi Cinema Foundation (the executive arm of the Iranian film institution and administrator of all film production) who announced that the film would not be finished until after the San Sebastian Festival. It was at this point that the festival changed its invitation and offered the filmmaker a place on the Official Jury, in what could be seen as a strategy for Kiarostami to get to know the festival in situ in view to the imminent premiere of his film.

The handwritten letter reproduced below, sent by the filmmaker on his return to Tehran, contains his impressions of a festival in which there is no shortage of references to the intimate atmosphere achieved here and which tends to disappear in the context of macro festivals.

With his official title, Kiarostami would win a historic Palme d’Or a few months later (ex aequo with the Asian filmmaker Shohei Imamura), which, although it would catapult him internationally, would not prevent him from continuing with an increasingly personal work, in which films in different formats, museum installations, photographic exhibitions and poetry publications would intertwine in the freest possible way.