Truth in Fiction

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to explicate how the films of Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami enable one to find what is real, due to their mode of intertwinement between reality and fiction. In a 1995 interview Kiarostami stated: "In cinema anything that can happen would be true. It doesn’t have to correspond to a reality, it doesn’t have to ‘really’ be happening. In cinema, by fabricating lies we may never reach the fundamental truth, but we will always be on our way to it. We can never get close to the truth except through lying”. Traditionally there is a clear distinction between reality and fiction in film. There is an assumption that documentary represents reality and relies on factual data, interviews, experts and witnesses used to present reality ‘as it is’. Contrary, all other forms are to some extent a play of fiction, which refers to something opposite of truth, intertwined with ‘lies’ and imagination. Whether it is his poetry, photography, fiction films or experimental documentaries, Abbas Kiarostami breaks the boundaries between reality and fiction and by doing so actually comes closer to truth itself. His films are educational and eye-opening in terms of his view on the world and the role of the spectator, which is reinvented over and over again.