The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who died yesterday at the age of seventy-six, was simply one of the most original and influential directors in the history of cinema. He achieved something that few filmmakers ever have: he seemed to create a national identity with his own cinematic style. He was the first Iranian filmmaker who expanded the history of cinema not merely in a sociological sense but in an artistic one, and his tenacious, bold, restless originality—an inventive audacity that carried through to his two last features, made outside of Iran—focused the attention of the world on the Iranian cinema and opened the Iranian cinema to other directors who have followed his path.

(http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/postscript-abbas-kiarostami-1940-2016)