Where Is the Friend’s House? 1988. Iran. Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. In Persian; English subtitles. 35mm. 84 min.
Abbas Kiarostami began his cinematic journey in the 1970s with a series of children’s films produced by the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon), an Iranian government agency. His brilliance was evident from early on, but those films—including Bread and Alley (1970), Experience (1973), and The Traveller (1974)—weren’t widely circulated until much later. It wasn’t until Where Is the Friend’s House? that Kiarostami made a major international breakthrough, after the film won multiple awards at the Locarno Film Festival. Through a schoolboy’s simple, desperate quest to return a classmate’s notebook, Kiarostami crafts a humanistic odyssey. With documentary-like precision and a tender, kaleidoscopic portrait of rural life, he elevates a childhood errand into a profound meditation on duty and innocence.