Over the past century, the relations between the U.S. and the Middle East have been troublesome at best. This is seen through U.S. interference in Middle Eastern affairs, with imperialist invasions abroad and political persecution of Arab Americans domestically. Iran is the most recent Middle Eastern subject of the Trump administration’s ire. Though U.S.-Iran relations have been tense since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Trump’s recent inflammatory actions—the abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal last year and the recent blaming of Iran for missile strikes in Saudi Arabia—have brought them to almost violent heights.

It is in these times of international hostility that we should look to learn from Iran and its culture instead of attacking it. One such avenue (though it should not be the only one) is seeing the work of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Celebrating the prolific, political filmmaker, there is a near-complete cinematic retrospective of his oeuvre at the Gene Siskel Film Center in the Chicago Loop neighborhood. It runs until Oct. 30. The Center’s Director of Programming, Barbara Scharres, emphasized that the retrospective is part of the Center’s lengthy history of exhibiting Iranian cinema (with their Festival of Films from Iran being in its 30th year this winter). Scharres shared that many of the films in the retrospective have been unavailable to the U.S. since their initial release. They are being shown alongside Kiarostami’s famous features.

Scharres noted that the retrospective was not orchestrated with the immense tension between the U.S. and Iran in mind; still, she acknowledges the “universal appeal” of Kiarostami’s films. Indeed, Kiarostami’s filmography is dedicated to simple, universal themes of journeying and inspecting. His films operate as a “microscope” into simple human relations, said Jayme Coveliers, a DePaul film student inspired by his work.

Kiarostami’s simple themes and tales aren’t shielding away deeper concerns, though. While the story to his first feature “The Traveler” (1974) is about a poor boy scheming to make enough money for a football game in Tehran, Kiarostami further inspects the relations between – as well as the hopes and struggles of – the boy’s impoverished community. Though Kiarostami’s influential film “Close-Up” (1990) is about a petty fraud trial, it is simultaneously about the social antagonisms between economic classes and the search for an escape in media from real-world suffering. Each of his films, though minimal in conventional plot, connect so universally because they are direct, political and engage with their audience about the socioeconomic structures under global capitalism.

Kiarostami’s effectiveness is due, in part, to his influences: such cinematic movements as the Italian Neorealist movement in the aftermath of World War II, which also contained minimal plot and non-professional actors, focusing on working class life after the devastation of war. Notably, Kiarostami also shows inspiration from documentary realism, stylized camera work, and postmodern themes of the French New Wave. This is not to say that Kiarostami didn’t add his own cultural and authorial flare. Kiarostami blends these elements to demonstrate a significantly underrepresented culture with temporal gravity and formal sophistication. As DePaul’s Media and Cinema Studies chair Michael DeAngelis put it: “Kiarostami is so adept at foregrounding the element of time in cinema–not only in his emphasis upon long takes, but more broadly through his positioning of time as a substance that the viewer must confront and engage with.” It was later French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard who once famously said, “Film begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.” Such is his formal importance.

Kiarostami’s commitment to portraying the struggles of the working class and the ambitions of dreamers in a cruel reality set his films among the most rewarding of international cinema. Viewing his films not only inform us of Iranian culture, but also of our universal connections.