Movie Review: ´Where is the Friend´s Home?´ by Abbas Kiarostami

I haven´t watched for ages a Kiarostami movie, but felt that Where is the Friend´s Home? may be an inspired return to the works of this symbol of Iranian cinema. 

Where is the Friend´s Home? (Khane-ye dust kojast?) is the first from the Koker Trilogy, featuring stories set in the small mud-bricked village situated in Rostamabad, Gilan, in the Northern part of the country. The other two movies from the series are Next Life, and Nothing More and Throught the Olive Trees. The movie is dedicated to one of the founders of the modern Iranian poetry, Sohrab Sepehri. 

Unfolding within one single day, the movie follows Ahmad´s efforts to return the homework notebook to his colleague, living in the village over the hill. The eight years old should though to find where exactly his friend lives and this innocent search makes the bone of the movie. His interactions with the adults and sometimes their random musings about childhood and education are such a rich resource of understanding how distant our adult world is from that of children´s. From the severe teacher who sticks to the rules to the parents who are considering often their children as just another category of adults that should assume chores and home responsibilities, there is so much to think and learn about how childhood is perceived. 

Within this larger framework, there is another layer that deserves more attention: language. Not in the sense of understanding a language, but as one-on-one communication. Ahmad repeats over and over again - I felt a bit too ostensibly though - his questions to the adults. They either do not hear or are immersed in their own conversations and thoughts. Or they just don´t care or don´t want to hear. 

For me, the most beautiful part of the movie is about the purity of heart that we may lose it when we advance in age. We are becoming selfish and cynical, that is. Ahmad knew that when his friend comes again without homework done he will be probably expelled. He does not think as we, adults, may think, that it was his fault for now checkin if he has the notebook with him. The solution to the problem, after crossing the hill twice and still not finding his friend, was so dear to my heart. 

Relevant for the movie is also the social context. The movie is set in 1987 and the village where the events are taking place, Koker is a poor village and besides being given the name of Kiarostami trilogy, the other reference to it is a devastating earthquake that took place there in 1990. The place is simple, people are simple, their lives seem to lack the complexities of the city life, still they offer a canvas for so many stories and interpretations. A perfect environment for the usual Kiarostami´s minimalistic artistic goals.

And after all, children are an expression of this normality and complex simplicity. Maybe this is how feelings and empathy are preserved after all.