HOME CINEMA
82 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
THE KOKER TRILOGY
WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE?/AND LIFE
GOES ON/THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES
Abbas Kiarostami; Iran 1987/92/94; Criterion UK;
Region B Blu-ray; 281 minutes; 1.66:1/ 1.66:1/ 1.85:1.
Extras: audio commentary on And Life Goes On featuring
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum;
documentary Abbas Kiarostami: Truths and Dreams
(1994); interview with Ahmad Kiarostami; conversation
between Jamsheed Akrami and critic Godfrey Cheshire
Reviewed by Nick James
One of many unforgettable images in Abbas
Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy is a zigzag path
cut into the side of a steep grassy hill, like a
double Zorro signature, or an open question
about one’s direction of travel. “Did you create
that?” a French TV interviewer asks the director
in the 1994 documentary portrait that’s part
of this package. “I did,” he admits, and goes
on to explain how all films are a series of
lies constructed to attain certain truths. The
pedagogical ability to persuade through tricks
and then reveal them, leading people to draw
their own conclusions, is central to Kiarostami’s
art. If you need a crash course in why he is one
What made Kiarostami the right man
to direct Where Is the Friend’s House? was his
work in the film department of the Institute
for Intellectual Development of Children and
Young Adults, which he had helped to set up in
1969, after an early career designing posters and
shooting ads for Iranian TV and title sequences
for movies. Festivals treated the film as a typical
Iranian production, but what happened next
transformed not only Kiarostami’s international
standing as a director but also, it is said, his
whole approach to life. On 21 June 1990, the
day before his 50th birthday, an earthquake
in the region around Koker killed between
35,000 and 50,000 people. In desperation the
director drove there, despite the hazards, to
find out what had happened to his young cast
members. His experience of the devastation and
the attitude of the people he met cured him of
a certain bitterness and led to the second Koker
film And Life Goes On, a kind of mystery story
that shoulders its gravitas stone by stone.
As this second film begins we meet an anxious
looking middle-aged man (Farhad Keradmand) on
a road trip with his insatiably inquisitive young
of the central filmmakers of recent times, the
Koker trilogy (plus its extras) is where to start,
and I can think of few textually richer, more
stimulating or more heartbreaking experiences.
Kiarostami – who had then made only one
early feature (The Report, 1977) – having written
the screenplay of the first film in the trilogy,
Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), did not at first
want to direct it. Fortunately, he was persuaded
to change his mind. A neorealist tale much in the
tradition of Iranian films made before and after
the 1979 revolution, though with an innovative
meandering structure, it begins in a classroom
for eight-year-old boys in the village of Koker:
Ahmad (Babek Ahmadpour) witnesses his
friend Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh (Ahmad
Ahmadpour) being chastised for bringing his
homework in on loose paper, instead of in
his notebook. If he does it again, the teacher
threatens, he’ll be expelled. Arriving home, the
timid, conscientious Ahmad – whose anxious,
freckled face rivets the attention throughout – is
alarmed to find two notebooks in his bag, his own
and Mohammad’s. Mohammad lives in Poshteh,
a village a short distance away, and Ahmad has to
wait until his mother asks him to buy some bread
before he can go scurrying there – a journey that
takes him up the zigzag path and through a grove
of olive trees (places we will see in all three films).
As night draws in, he has a series of variously
intimidating encounters with people who try, and
largely fail, to help him find his friend’s home.
‘Difficult yet relaxed’: Through the Olive Trees
Gorgeous, compassionate and
elusive, the three films that made
Abbas Kiarostami’s international
reputation remain a rich pleasure
A WINDING PATH
There’s a charm in the way
films that at first seem so simple
gradually proffer complexity:
it’s an enriching experience
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