#990: KIAROSTAMI, Abbas: Where Is The Friend's House? (1987)

KIAROSTAMI, Abbas (Iran)
THE KOKER TRILOGY
Where Is The The Friend's House? [1987]
Spine #990
Blu-ray

Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for this wondrous, slyly self-referential series of films set in the rural northern-Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, the lyrical fables in The Koker Trilogy exemplify both the gentle humanism and the playful sleight of hand that define the director's sensibility. With each successive film, Kiarostami takes us deeper into the behind-the-scenes "reality" of the film that preceded it, heightening our understanding of the complex network of human relationships that sustain both a movie set and a village. The result is a gradual outward zoom that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life.



The first film in Abbas Kiarostami's sublime, interlacing Koker Trilogy takes a simple premise — a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken — and transforms it into a miraculous child's-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. Sensitive and profound, Where Is the Friend's House is shot through with all the beauty, tension, and wonder a single day can contain.

83 minutes

Color
Monaural
in Persian
1:66:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2019

Director/Writer

Abbas Kiarostami was 47 when he wrote and directed Where is the Friend's House?

Other Kiarostami films in the Collection:

#519: Close-up (1990)
#991: And Life Goes On (1992)
#992: Through The Olive Trees (1994)
#45: Taste Of Cherry (1997)
#612: Certified Copy (2010)
#708: Like Someone In Love (2012)
#956: 24 Frames (2017)

The Film

Ahmad (Babek Ahmed Poor) is a good eight-year-old boy. He does his homework, helps his mother with the laundry and the baby, and doesn’t want to see his friend Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh (Babek’s brother, Ahmed Ahmed Poor) get expelled from school. Ahmad has mistakenly picked up Mohammad’s homework notebook, and is determined to return it to him before school the next day.

Beautifully shot (DP: Farhad Saba) and scored (Amine Allah Hessine), this first part of the Trilogy is a naturalistic voyage into life in a small Iranian village.

Kiarostami himself created the zigzag path!

Film Rating (0-60):

56

The Extras

The Booklet

Thirty-six page booklet featuring an essay by critic Godfrey Cheshire.

“Poetry has a special place in Kiarostami’s artistic outlook. While Iran has a long poetic tradition and Iranians of all social backgrounds know many of its products by heart, Kiarostami not only memorized vast quantities of verse and published volumes of his own during his lifetime, he also used poetry, both classical and modern, as a model for his aesthetic decisions in film, and a number of his films incorporate or refer to poems. Sohrab Sepehri, one of his favorite modern poets, wrote a poem titled “Where is the Friend’s House?” that is plainly mystical. Kiarostami said the poem didn’t inspire his film; he simply borrowed its title. Yet the kind of mysticism that suffuses Sepehri’s poem, like the medieval poetry it descends from, accords with many of the film’s narrative and symbolic motifs. The concept of orientation that animates so many Kiarostami films has an important place in Sufi myticism, as does the quest theme. Visually, the zigzag hill can be seen as a reflection of the mystical Mount Qaf, the arena of human striving leading up to the divine, itself symbolized by that lone tree. Sufis use ‘Friend’ to denote God, but also apply the term to a pir, a spiritual master or guide — the Arabic terms for which can also be translated as ‘old man,’ a figure that appears in many Kiarostami films.”

Commentary

None.

Homework (1989)

A feature-length documentary by director Kiarostami.

He begins by saying that he and his wife were having trouble getting their own son to do his homework.

Interviewing kids about homework and cartoons. One kid is seriously disturbed. Another sings a religious song he learned the night before, and thus couldn’t finish his homework. His voice is shot, probably from having to stay up all night learning it.

One of the most chilling scenes shows the kids all lined up in the courtyard, having to sing along with a dirge with lyrics encouraging the kids to “kill Saddam.” Kiarostami turns down the sound as many of the youngsters start fooling around during the sacred tune.

Makes you wonder how much self-censoring he must have been compelled to do.

Another great scene feature a parent who had lived abroad and openly questioned the State’s educational methods. (“US and Canada don’t give any homework [!]; Japan drives their kids to suicide,” etc.)

Conversation

Between Kiarostami and programmer Peter Scarlet.

Kiarostami gives long answers, which his female translator manages to memorize and respond to. He refers to his 24 Frames concept, which he seems to have already been working on …

His translator has a fantastic memory. Here’s a long coupla paragraphs, for example:

“Just one point about the darkness in theaters … why do we watch films in the dark? At the beginning I thought that this was for the quality of the image that was shown on the screen that would be seen better in the dark, but now I realize that it’s not at all that … the reason why we’re in the dark is that we are able to extract ourselves from the context in which we are, and even with whom you were sitting; even if we’re here with our beloved companion, it doesn’t matter … we can at times have a look at the other just for a moment of sharing an emotion or a feeling or empathy, but mostly we are there to be alone in front of the work, and that’s what the darkness allows us to experience. We are here as an individual, sitting in front of the work, and we have this unique personal relationship to the work. For me, that’s all cinema is about — that’s the very duty of cinema. We are here to be left alone to a world that is opening to us; if not, in cinema as it has turned today, which is just a bigger version of a TV series, I don’t see the point of bothering to leave our comfortable homes and come in the theater to see the same thing all together, to make sure that we have the same opinions and the same feelings; we cry at the same moment and we laugh at the same moment, and we judge the same way, and we’re able to discuss about the same subject — that’s not what cinema is meant for. For me, we are here to be really able to experience a unique personal relationship to a different world.”

And this was before the pandemic!

Extras Rating (0-40):

36

56 + 36 =

92

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