Childhood, politics, and kindness in Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s House?
On September 20th, I had the privilege to start off my year as a programmer for the Cinema Studies Student Union with a screening of Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 film Where is the Friend’s House? at Free Friday Films (FFF). Below is an edited version of the pre-show speech I presented before the screening. I encourage you all to watch the film if you missed the event, as well as Kiarostami’s short film Two Solutions for One Problem!
(Free Friday Films run every Friday at 7 pm at Innis Town Hall. Follow @cinssu on Instagram to see what we’re playing!)
Where is the Friend’s House? (1987), the first of Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, features a young Iranian boy named Ahmad who accidentally takes home both his and his friend Mohammad Reza’s notebooks after school. The story follows Ahmad as he journeys from his hometown of Koker to the neighbouring town of Poshteh in hopes of returning Mohammad Reza’s notebook so that the latter may complete his homework and avoid being disciplined at school the next day.
If you have even a modicum of empathy towards children, this film is, first and foremost, incredibly frustrating. A contradictory “logic” seems to permeate every interaction Ahmad has with his elders: on the one hand, the weight of the world is placed on doing your homework, to the point where the boys’ unempathetic teacher threatens Mohammad Reza with expulsion over it. (This threat is both explained and made more significant by the film’s implication of scarce educational opportunities in this rural area, as children from Poshteh must make a long trek to Koker every morning to attend school.) On the other hand, hardly any adult is willing to help Ahmad ensure that Mohammad Reza can complete what is, according to them, his most important responsibility. Instead, they insist that Ahmad should do his own homework first before “playing.”
Adding to this frustration is the sense of disorientation we feel in Poshteh. Identical-looking houses and nameless strangers tower over Ahmad’s literal zigzagging back and forth through forests and alleyways that possess only vaguely discernible spatial relationships with one another. Adults provide Ahmad with unfamiliar neighbourhood names and directions, and children use somewhat unhelpful markers like different coloured doors, donkeys, and clothes hanging out to dry to describe locations. Ultimately, the film replicates what it is like to try to orient yourself as a child. When I was younger, I did not know that my home was in the northeast corner of the neighbourhood, or that it was 1.2 km away from the nearest mall. I did know that my neighbour’s golden retriever always barked at us through the fence, and the big, tall tree in my front yard swayed violently during thunderstorms and froze over in the winter.
(Side note: this confusing representation of the world leads to some hilarious situations that help cut the film’s rising tension and frustration. Where is the Friend’s House? features some borderline cartoonish visual gags that both delight us and further remind us of the whimsy of childhood.)
I think the power of this film lies in the fact that Kiarostami understands what it means to experience the world as a child—especially when this world is patriarchal, hierarchical, and undervalues the needs and opinions of children. Abbas Kiarostami, who began his film career in the 1970s working with the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, made many films starring child protagonists. Our FFF screening on the 20th began with one of Kiarostami’s early educational shorts, Two Solutions for One Problem, which is a sort of thematic preamble to Where is the Friend’s House? In this short, two boys, Dara and Nader, go about resolving a conflict about a ripped notebook in two ways: first, by exacting increasingly violent revenge against one another and ultimately gaining nothing; and second, by simply fixing the notebook and remaining friends. Interestingly, this short does not feature an adult authority telling Dara and Nader what the correct (i.e., moral, efficient, obedient) solution for their problem is. Rather, the message conveyed is that the boys ought to choose the second solution not to please a teacher or parent, but rather, for the sake of their own friendship.
Given his institutional backing in a post-revolutionary context, it’s notable how Kiarostami offers a quiet, though visible resistance to the social and political order that makes his protagonist’s journey so difficult. As Nico Baumbach (2016) argues, children are “both inside and outside the logic of society,” which allows them to push the limitations imposed on them (277). Our identification with Ahmad leads to a frustration with the adults in his life, which in turn allows us to question their authority and the patriarchal values they frequently espouse to justify dismissing his needs.
Later in his career, Kiarostami moved further into feature films and dealt more heavily with themes of blending fiction and reality. The next two films in the Koker trilogy are increasingly metatextual, with And Life Goes On… (1990) featuring actors playing Abbas Kiarostami and his son searching for the real actors from Where is the Friend’s House? in the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in northern Iran, and Through the Olive Trees (1994) presenting a fictional couple starring in the previous film. If you took CIN301 or are generally a fan of Iranian art house (I am both), you might also be familiar with Kiarostami’s docu-fiction masterpiece Close-Up (1990), which re-enacts the story of a man who tricked a family into believing he was the real-life director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Although these later films primarily feature adult protagonists and appear far more complicated than his works in the Institute, the view of the world that Kiarostami offers remains distinctly childlike. In all of these films, the world is difficult, confusing, and sometimes painful to navigate, but it is also made easier to live in through the empathy of friends, family, and strangers. Thus, Ahmad’s loyalty to Mohammad Reza ought truly to be admired. Despite the rules and expectations that separate us from one another in an attempt to predetermine our priorities, we must always remember to be kind and compassionate.
Bibliography
Baumbach, Nico. “Shareable cinema: The politics of Abbas Kiarostami.” In The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, edited by Seung-hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski, 271–286. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Accessed October 1, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501312663.ch-015.