With each film he made, the internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami left critics grasping for superlatives, and his death this past Monday has challenged them to find ways to fully describe the distinctive nature of his cinematic mastery. In his New Yorker obituary for Kiarostami, Richard Brody calls him “simply one of the most original and influential directors in the history of cinema,” as well as “the first Iranian filmmaker who expanded the history of cinema not merely in a sociological sense but in an artistic one,” whose “tenacious, bold, restless originality” brought the world to Iranian cinema and Iranian cinema to the world.

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