'You want to send a message? Go to the post office'

The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami explains to Chris Darke why his new film doesn't tell it straight

During the 1990s, Iranian cinema achieved international attention and acclaim. In festivals and art-houses, Iran was distributing films whose apparent simplicity concealed complex meanings. And Abbas Kiarostami has come to be seen as its ambassador.

During the 1990s, Iranian cinema achieved international attention and acclaim. In festivals and art-houses, Iran was distributing films whose apparent simplicity concealed complex meanings. And Abbas Kiarostami has come to be seen as its ambassador.

Winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997 for A Taste of Cherry cemented his status as a fully-fledged international auteur and critics' favourite. He is also a standard-bearer for the cultural dialogue that Iran has been developing with the West. But the nexus of cultural politics through which the films travel, the way in which the status of "ambassador" can overwhelm the work of the artist, can lead us away from the fact that Kiarostami is, first and last, a film-maker.

"François Truffaut said that if you want to send a message you should go to the post office," he tells me. In a busy Paris café we are talking about his current film The Wind Will Carry Us to a background of car horns from the taxi-drivers' protest at petrol prices. The politics of the street and the politics of cinema: neither is straightforward. And Kiarostami knows this. It is not only Western journalists who want clear statements, a manifesto, anything to nail down the allusive webs of meaning that his films create.

"Many Iranians living abroad follow events through newspapers and are normally very anxious to know what goes on," Kiarostami tells me through an interpreter. "They want to get a message from a film but I have no interest in providing clear-cut answers and definitely not a political message. A film-maker who wants to convey a political message should engage in politics directly."

Kiarostami is a trim 60-year-old, whose career as a film-maker in Iran goes back 30 years. He has seen and survived the fall of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution, the long war with Iraq and the terrible earthquakes of 1991, the aftermath of which informed two of his international breakthrough films, And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees.

As a young man, he studied at the Tehran Academy of Fine Arts while holding down a day job in the traffic department of the Tehran Police and then worked as a graphic artist designing credit sequences for films. In 1969 he was asked to set up the film department in the Institute for the Intellectual Development for Children and Young Adults (Kanun), where he began to make documentaries. (He is also a painter and an accomplished landscape photographer.)

It might come as a surprise to learn that Iran is the tenth largest producer of films in the world. A "populist" cinema that affirms Islamic values through genres such as comedies, adventure films and family dramas exists alongside the "quality" strand of art film-making supported by a serious cinephile culture. As a figurehead of the latter, Kiarostami has nurtured the upcoming generation of film-making talent, including writing The White Balloon for his former assistant Jafar Panahi, whose new film The Circle has caused huge controversy in Iran (it deals frankly with the plight of women). Bahman Ghobadi, Kiarostami's assistant on The Wind Will Carry Us, was a prize-winner at Cannes for his film A Time for Drunken Horses, as was Samira Makhmalbaf with Blackboards.

The Wind Will Carry Us opens on a characteristic Kiarostami landscape - a dusty road zig-zagging through burnished fields. The camera watches from a distance as a truck negotiates the rugged terrain and immediately we are in the film's world - one that needs to be listened to as much as looked at. The camera holds back and the soundtrack gives us the conversation as though we are inside the van with the film crew searching for a village where a 100-year-old woman is on her deathbed.

"During the ceremonies following funerals women actually scar their faces and this is done in only two parts of Iran," Kiarostami explained. The film chronicles the attempts of an image-hunter, masquerading as an engineer, to get news of the old woman's condition in the hope that he might capture this footage. A comical complication is that every time he receives a call from his office, he has to take off in his van to a hill outside the village in order to receive a clear line for his mobile phone.

Here he encounters a worker - whom we hear but never see - excavating an underground route for communication lines. It appears that the film was an exercise in making a virtue of necessity. "None of the women who had scarred their faces were prepared to be filmed," he told me. "And throughout my career I've never used make-up, and even in this case I didn't want to break with my tradition."

Kiarostami has spoken of how The Wind Will Carry Us was the hardest of all his films to make. "I realised it when I came out of the cinema having seen the film for the first time," he admits. "Each film, of course, has its own problems. With this one, the villagers were working extremely hard so they had no time for us. All of the actors in the film were workers from the nearby villages who were invited to take part. They didn't understand films and so had no special motivation to appear before the camera. I have made four films in villages which weren't very remote, so they had some idea of the cinema and it was much easier to work with them.

"One of the interesting things about using non-professional actors is the way they respond to the film and want to see themselves being portrayed. But when people have no desire for this it makes the job much more difficult because there's no two-way dialogue." No dialogue and no footage. But out of the lack of these Kiarostami constructs a parable on the perils of visibility, where life goes on away from the camera.

In one remarkable sequence the film-maker goes to get milk from a young woman who keeps a cow in an underground cellar. She, the fiancée of the excavator on the hill, listens to the "engineer" as he recites an erotic poem to her (the film's title is taken from a work by the Iranian woman poet Forough Farrokhzad) and a subterranean circuit of desire is set up that resonates through the film's use of poetry and sound to form a powerful counterpoint to its images.

"It's a sort of cinema that may not be terribly satisfying immediately," says Kiarostami. "But it leaves an impression that will stay with people. I think that what is happening is that cinema is going back to its beginnings. In those days, films were made in the simplest ways possible and they were not so much in the service of the industry. Today, most films are made through technology rather than through the creative mind of the film-maker.

"This type of cinema is gradually gaining in popularity, not just in Iran - it's a general phenomenon to do with people's rejection of the sex and violence portrayed in film. But I think that it is a healthier kind of film, one that hopefully encourages thought." He laughs, adding, "Part of this success is to do with the lack of facilities in Iran. I calculated that the cost of Taste of Cherry was less than one per cent of Titanic."

'The Wind Will Carry Us' (U): ICA, SW1 (020 7930 3647), and the Lux, N1 (020 7684 2021), from Friday