The films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami are banned in his home country but now the authorities want to screen his latest work, and he is having none of it, he tells Angelique Chrisafis

AS HE WALKS down the half-lit stairwell of a Paris cafe where Picasso and Modigliani used to hang out, Abbas Kiarostami takes out his camera and snatches a shot of a painted frieze. "Very nice," he smiles, with the wonderment of a man abroad.

Kiarostami - the godfather of Iranian cinema, a director who has won so many international awards that he long ago stopped accepting them - still seems very much the outsider in the western cities that celebrate him as one of the greatest film-makers of all time. Unlike other Iranian directors who fled abroad, he still lives in Tehran, despite a regime that has not permitted his films to be shown there for the past 10 years. Yet Kiarostami does not overtly preach politics, saying the regime does its thing, he does his - his thing being to capture Iranians' everyday lives with a tenderness and gentle humour that makes western audiences melt.

European and US arts supremos have long schemed to get him to direct in the west, hoping he'll bring with him the poetic, intensely human touch of films such as Taste of Cherry, in which a sad-eyed man about to commit suicide on a hillside tries to convince various strangers to bury him afterwards. But Kiarostami, 68, chooses foreign projects with care, wary of stepping outside his own Iranian arena. He has just finished directing his first opera, Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, at the Aix-en-Provence festival in France. "The most moving thing anyone said to me," he says, "was that it was the kindest, friendliest, most human version they had ever seen." Meanwhile, his Looking at Tazieh- a remarkable multimedia installation about an ancient epic that whips Iranian villagers into a frenzy - was at the Edinburgh International Festival this month. When the French actor Juliette Binoche saw it, she bawled her eyes out all the way through, and ever since has buried herself in books on Shiism and Islam, to "understand why these people were crying like that".

Tazieh is a traditional form of passion play that recounts epic sagas in memory of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. One minute it's getting belly laughs, the next distraught sobbing and breast-beating; audiences lose themselves in a kind of ritual mourning and group outpouring of grief. So rapt are the enthralled audience of Tazieh that no amount of hamming or artifice can put them off. Kiarostami remembers watching a performance as a child: an actor dressed as a lion took out a cigarette for a quick smoke without remotely putting the audience off. "The guy who came over to light his cigarette was crying - he was swept away by the rest of the performance."

To Kiarostami, this spellbound, gut-wrenched audience who completely identify with the characters could not be further from European theatre, with its realistic norms. So he decided to play one of his notorious games. Rather than simply stage a Tazieh play, he travelled to far-flung Iranian villages and filmed the spectators themselves. Looking at Taziehfeatures a Tazieh play framed by bigger screens, each showing close-ups of men and women in the audience, wracked with emotion. Western audiences have no choice but to guess at the action through their reactions, effectively imagining their own personal show. "The faces of the Iranian spectators are the subtitles," Kiarostami says.

AT A TIMEwhen Iran has been cast as the axle of the "axis of evil", Kiarostami reminds us that there are real people living there; his work invites us to form a bond with them, creating "a feeling of empathy between people who have nothing in common". He says: "That's really my definition of art. Art's only mission is to make people feel closer." Some of his western friends surprised him with the depth of their response. European film directors, including Italy's Ermanno Olmi, said that for a moment they had felt completely Iranian, religious and imbued with a sense of fate.

Kiarostami has always countered western bafflement that he is not more overtly political by arguing that capturing the slightest emotions of people's lives is always a political gesture. But Looking at Tazieh- which unfolds on three gigantic screens, each showing different footage - is perhaps his clearest evocation of what life is like under Ahmadinejad's regime: it's about theatre as an emotional release.

"The need for laughter and tears is so natural and strong, especially for people who live in dictatorships," he says. "Their first need is the feeling of empathy, to find someone with whom they can share their deeper feelings. For those people, going and attending the Tazieh can be a way of relating these deep emotions. There is a natural tendency for laughing and crying in everyone, but specifically in countries in which people are oppressed."

Kiarostami says that when the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci saw the film, he was gripped: "He told me, 'You're very lucky to live in a country where there is still such innocence. The time of innocence existed in Italy too, but after the 1950s, when the economy improved, God knows why, we lost that innocence. The richer people got, the less innocent they were in their relationship to art.'"

In Iran, where film and television are replacing old traditions of street theatre, Tazieh is becoming rare. Kiarostami had to drive far into rural areas to find performances. It's perhaps ironic that Looking at Taziehis the only Kiarostami film Iranian authorities want to show. One city asked to screen it. "For once, I was the one who refused," recalls Kiarostami. "I said, 'The day that you show all my films, you can also show this. You can't just choose this, because you consider it something religious you can use in a different way.'

"It's been getting worse and worse - none of my films have been shown for the last 10 years in Iran. And this is not just about me. It's not that they have a problem with what I do. It's that, more generally, they cannot accept independent films."

Kiarostami says talking politics is pointless for him as a film director. Yet Looking at Tazieh clearly invites westerners to step into Iranians' shoes. "Of course, I feel pain when I see that my country is considered evil," he says. "So in all my films, my wish is to give a kinder and a warmer image of human beings and of my country. Every morning, when I wake up, I have to say hello to my neighbours. And this is what I like to show in my films: friendship, love between people."

Guardian service