In Ten on Ten, a 2004 documentary featuring ten short scenes in which Kiarostami speaks in a car on his work in filming 2001's Ten – itself a ten-part movie featuring short video sequences shot entirely inside a car – the filmmaker makes a series of highly provocative statements. This occurs in the context of a discussion of the radical possibilities that he claims opened to him when, starting with that beguiling sequence at the end of Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami started using digital cameras. Referring to the production of ABC Africa – his first feature-length digital production, and which was shot in Uganda – he says:

I want to take seriously Kiarostami's claim that his move to digital – which resulted in two of his most morally unsettling movies – allowed him to report absolute truth. This is surprising, even shocking, coming from Kiarostami. After all, ABC Africa – the only recent Kiarostami feature we can reasonably safely call a documentary – seems to subvert distinctions between truth and artifice, fact and fiction, the real and the fake, the found and the staged, and so on (distinctions on which some definitions of documentary cinema rely). The statements also jar with certain tropes that have become quite familiar in film and documentary theory: tropes which emphasise the constructedness of the film image, the partiality of the documentarian's claim to truth, the power relations silently bound up in the very act of attempting to report the facts ‘neutrally’, the inevitability of bias in a filmed account of events, etc. Further, the statements sit uneasily with much of the academic criticism of Kiarostami's work, with its emphasis on the categories of uncertainty, partiality, and ambiguity, and which has lauded the director for the complex ways in which he draws attention to the tenuousness and contingency of cinematic claims to truth through reflexive formal techniques.