You may not know the name Abbas Kiarostami yet, but you will soon. The Victoria and Albert Museum is mounting two installations by the Iranian writer and film director. The National Film Theatre will show a retrospective of his films and his work will be the centrepiece of a Channel 4 season on Iran. Two new books about him will be published. His recent, most radical film, Five, will go on release. He will do two workshops and four “In Conversation” interviews. The Iran Heritage Foundation will present an international conference about him. Two magazines will publish Kiarostami special issues. There will be an exhibition of his photography.

So who is this 65-year-old Tehrani and why are the film, art, publishing and academic worlds so excited? According to the high priest of art cinema, Jean-Luc Godard: “Cinema began with D. W.Griffith and ended with Abbas Kiarostami.” One American critic, Philip Lopate, wrote: “We don’t know it yet, but we are living in the age of Kiarostami.”

Richard Pena, head of film at the Lincoln Centre in New York, called Kiarostami “one of the handful of great directors working today”. In 1999, after winning 46 international film prizes, he announced that he would accept no more.

This degree of acclaim is rare, but here’s a more modest starting point. In February I went to Tehran to make a documentary for Channel 4 about Iranian cinema. I met and interviewed all the key figures, from the founding fathers to the newest talents.

As part of this, I spent several days with Kiarostami. On one of them — during which the city had its biggest snowfall in 20 years — he agreed to travel with my film crew to meet a man who had been a boy actor in his breakthrough film Where is the Friend’s House?, made in 1986. At one point, in our van, as we sped along a slushy motorway, Kiarostami took our camera from our cinematographer — the best in Iran — and pressed it against the glass. When I looked at the many hours of rushes, Kiarostami’s shot was by far the best. A small drip rolled down the window as the snowy, sepia landscapes of Iran whizzed by. The result was beautiful, a mini drama.

Then I went to see Kiarostami’s Trees in Snow photographs which he had just finished printing and hand mounting, and which are also at the V&A. And there it was again. The same attention to detail, the same interest in landscape.

Kiarostami did not do well at school, but always had an interest in graphics. He completed a degree in fine arts, was a traffic policeman, designed advertisements and film titles in the 1960s and then, in 1969, set up the film department of the Iranian Government’s Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Claiming that he hadn’t seen many films, and influenced by pioneering Iranian directors and by Yasujiro Ozu of Japan, he began making short movies about children, education and the role of the imagination. He also began taking landscape photographs and writing poetry.

In 1986, seven years after the Islamic Revolution, Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s House? attracted international attention. Soon after it was made, the village where he filmed was hit by a devastating earthquake which killed 50,000 people. Kiarostami went back, ostensibly to find the boys who had appeared in Where is the Friend’s House?, and the journey became And Life Goes On, a meditation on searching, tragedy and recovery.

During the filming, he met a man, Hossein, who was married just five days after the earthquake. Intrigued, Kiarostami put Hossein in the second film. Then he made a third, Through the Olive Trees, almost entirely about Hossein’s short scene in the second.

With the completion of this trilogy the scope of Kiarostami’s vision was finally apparent. He combined a detached, almost Buddhist, view of life with a playful disregard for the medium in which he had become a master. Filming crushes people like Hossein, he seemed to be saying. Film equipment deforms life.

No surprise, then, that from 1997 onwards, Kiarostami has largely abandoned film cameras for simpler, less intrusive video cameras. More than the Danish Dogme directors, he has radicalised the use of video, most famously in Ten, which was shot entirely in a car with dashboard cameras. Five goes even further, eliminating people altogether.

Elimination, in fact, is the nub of the matter. For 30 years Kiarostami has been stripping cinema of its trappings — actors, lighting, music, camera moves — and pretence. At the same time, like Paul Cézanne in his constant repainting of Mont St Victoire, he has been returning to the same locations and real people. His latest film, Tickets, is a collaboration with Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi, but already he is talking about working again with the non-professional actors he used, extending their story.

No other film-maker in the world is as snared by the real world as he seems to be. Most cinema skims the surface of life — though not in Kiarostami’s hands. The American critic was wrong; our era is very unlike Kiarostami’s work. That is a shame.

Kiarostami Season

For details of other Kiarostami-related events see www.iranheritage.org