6 ideas
A film should leave deliberate gaps so that each viewer finishes it in their own mind, producing as many films as there are spectators. Withholding information, endings, or off-screen action turns the audience from passive consumers into co-authors, and that engagement lasts longer than a fully resolved story.
Kiarostami casts non-professionals whose lives already hold the qualities a character needs, then builds the role around who they are rather than asking them to become someone else. The director's job is to set up conditions in which the person behaves truthfully, not to teach them to perform.
Non-actors are fed lines, often one at a time, just before a take and are not given the full script. This keeps them from rehearsing into stiffness and preserves spontaneous reactions. The director manipulates the situation off-camera so that what the camera records is an authentic response.
The frame is a tool for choosing what not to show as much as what to show. Sound, voices, and events kept off-screen push viewers to imagine the missing space, and that imagined space can carry more feeling than anything shown directly.
Tiny budgets, small crews, and simple equipment such as the digital camera free a filmmaker from dependence on producers and technology. Kiarostami treats limitation as a source of invention and intimacy, and he tells students to make films now with what they have rather than wait for resources.
Kiarostami puts close attention to everyday reality ahead of plot. A filmmaker's first task is to look patiently at ordinary people, landscapes, and moments until their poetry shows, and his workshops train perception before technique.