Where is the friend’s house?
Where is the friend's House?
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Writer: Abbas Kiarostami
Cast & details:
Stars: Babek Ahmed Poor, Ahmed Ahmed Poor, Khodabakhsh Defaei
Genre: Drama
Runtime: 83 minutes
Language: Persian with English, Spanish and French subtitle.
Premiere status: Won the Bronze Leopard at the 1989 Locarno Film Festival and also won the Golden Plate at the Fajr Film Festival.
Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1940. He graduated from university with of fine arts and worked as a graphic designer. He started his career as a filmmaker at the age of 30. Since then he had made many movies and considered as one of the most important creative minded figures in contemporary Iranian film. He is also famous in the arts world, and had numerous gallery exhibitions of his photography, short films and poetry. He passed away in 2016.
Synopsis, (warning, spoilers):
Ahmad Ahmad Poor an elementary school student takes his friend´s (Mohammad Reza Nemat Zadeh) notebook home by mistake. When Ahmed returns home, he realizes about that and makes a decision of returning it back although his mother doesn’t let him go out.
So finally he leaves the house and sets out in search Mohammed’s house, encountering false leads, dead ends, and distractions as he attempts to enlist adults in his search. But at the end when he can’t find the house, he ends up doing the homework for his friend at night; so the next day the homework is all done and given good score by the teacher.
Analysis:
As the young boy zigzags across two towns, and tries his best to find his friend’s house, you understand a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity.
The concept of personal responsibility that is shown by the child efforts is admirable and all the difficulties that he takes just for helping his friend and accepting the consequence of his own mistake.
Some of the important international reviews of the movie are as below:
“Where is the Friend’s House? has all the qualities that put Iranian cinema on the map: formal simplicity, emotional directness, and the use of children as a window into societal ills.” – The New York Times
“Poke beneath the film’s surface and you’ll find a movie about the moral duties we owe to each other in any society, about what it means to be a good person, and about taking care of each other.” – Vox
“Friend’s Home is so much more than a simple rehashing of Italian neorealist traditions; it is rich in symbolism and poetic form.” – In Review
“Where is the friend’s house?” is a movie about love, kindness and friendship. In today’s harsh and cruel society, it tries to remind its audience the forgotten humanity. Our modern urban society based on the capitalist system is a society in which all human relations are defined on the basis of trading, benefits and loss. And modern human beings expect their benefits for everything they do. Moral values and empathetic relationships have faded and humans have become predators.