Iranian film legend Abbas Kiarostami died July 4 at the age of 76 in France, thousands of miles away from his place of birth in Tehran, where he and other filmmakers ushered in the so-called Iranian New Wave. While Kiarostami had recently been in Iran receiving treatment for cancer, the news of his death has shocked Iranians and film lovers across the world.

“Iran has lost a towering figure in international cinema,” tweeted Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. He called the filmmaker “ostad,” an honorific that means "maestro." Culture Minister Ali Jannati called Kiarostami a humanist who introduced a new cinema that brought the Iranian arts to the world. Majid Majidi, another Iranian New Wave filmmaker who most recently directed the government-funded mega-budget film about the Prophet Muhammad, said that Kiarostami “was not just a filmmaker, he was a philosopher.” Academy Award-winning director Asghar Farhadi, who became an international name with his 2011 film “A Separation,” credited Kiarostami for paving the way for him and other film directors.

Kiarostami's style was widely considered subtle and minimalist, but American film director Martin Scorsese described his work as “overflowing with beauty and surprise, patiently and exquisitely captured.” It was also described as apolitical, though some would differ on that point as well. Unlike those of other famous Iranian directors, such as Jafar Panahi, whose film “Offside” was overtly about the ban on female attendance in soccer stadiums, Kiarostami’s politics were subtle yet piercing.

His 1990 film “Close-Up,” about a man who cons a family into thinking he is famous Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is based on the a true story that became a public scandal in Iran. Kiarostami was able to talk all of the original people involved in the story into re-enacting their experiences for his narrative film. While the work explores identity and illusion, one of the main unspoken themes of the film is the backdrop of poverty and desperation of the 1980s for many Iranians who were ravaged by eight devastating years of war. Like many of Kiarostami’s films, it was not well received in Iran and only later found critical success when it reached an international audience.