Movie Review | Where is the Friend’s House? by Abbas Kiarostami 

Here’s a relatable situation: You’ve just got back from school, and realised that by accident, your friend’s homework book was brought home with you, and the lack of completing the day’s homework will bring punishment from the class teacher, which leaves you with no option but to return the book back to your friend. Here’s where the situation now gets slightly less. This is Rural Iran in 1987, and the smartphone, internet, and GPS did not quite exist back then. To top it all off, you have no clue where your friend stays, apart from the name of their village. What is the best thing you could do in this scenario? Set out on a walk that soon becomes a quest.

My introduction to the beauty of Iranian cinema came about through Abbas Kiarostami and the wonderfully deceptive simplicity of his works. ‘Where is the Friend’s House?’ is the first film in what went on to become the Koker Trilogy, and there seems to be a sense of wonderment at the outset of this deeply thoughtful film. It was also the Kiarostami film I watched, only because I came across a particular shot used in the film during a period when social media still did not have the concept of reels. Through every character, there seems to be a quick glance into each lens that constructs a kaleidoscope of people, each of whom has their own worldview, thought process and behaviours. Young Ahmed is naive, but above all, he is a good person. You can see that in his actions when, early into his journey, his grandfather forcefully sends him to buy tobacco, allowing the camera to rest with the old man and his companions, to whom he claims that he will soon make a “man” out of Ahmed. When asked how he would do so, Ahmed’s grandfather states that through violence (beating), Ahmed will not only inculcate value but also ultimately find respect in society. While in the preface, this conversation directly speaks about innocence and the loss of it; upon a closer look, you begin to see the subtle political undertones the director leaves for audiences to join together, creating the deeper jigsaw puzzle of a regime that now finds several great filmmakers (and artists) being prevented from being able to express themselves.

Not all of the older characters are similar in thinking, of course, and in Ahmed’s inevitably tedious journey (especially for a child), he finds the aid of people who open newer doors and windows of thought. The film is scented with such beautiful detail that one may so very easily end up missing, which breaks away from the simplicity of it all, and yet makes you wonder how someone can use that very simplicity to convey something far more than what is said. It is very easy to undermine a child with an adult’s idea of “inexperience”, an assumption in which adults often make the critical mistake of forgetting that not only do children have feelings (perhaps they are more in tune with their feelings than most adults) but also that they too were once children.

Coming back to the shot that introduced me to this film, in all of its wide grandeur, it seems to echo something far greater when thought about. A winding, hilly path with a solitary tree on the hilltop is one of the many great ways that Kiarostami uses landscape in his filmography. This shot in particular, however, feels like a motif on the zig-zag nature of life itself. And Young Ahmed runs across it – Disobeying the commands of adults as he seeks to help a friend, for only he knows the importance of it. It isn’t the grand act of friendship that concerns him as much as the possibility of his friend not being able to complete his work. During the closure of the film, Kiarostami provides closure in ways that, quite simply put, almost nobody else has been able to, or at least, in the consistent subtle fashion that he has been able to use in constantly reinventive ways throughout his illustrious career, and the result is a wide smile, a heart full of hope and a flower used as a bookmark that, to us, an audience, will forever remind us of a journey never written but witnessed in all of its beautiful, simple glory.