NEW YORK — When the French actress Juliette Binoche won her only Oscar, in 1997, for “The English Patient,’’ she recalls journalists asking if she was planning to move to the United States to carve out a bigger career in Hollywood. Her response: “No, I just want to go to Iran and work with Abbas Kiarostami.’’ That answer no doubt met with surprise, even from celebrity chroniclers familiar with the visionary Iranian writer-director, whose poetic, humanist works (“Taste of Cherry,’’ “Close-Up,’’ “Life and Nothing More . . .’’) eschew the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking.
