Where is the Friend's House?

Abbas Kiastorami directed this Iranian film in 1987, apparently producing the picture with government money from Ministry of Children's Affairs. The film may have had a didactic "pitch" -- the Ministry would invest money in a picture demonstrating, in a quietly inoffensive way, the routine mistreatment that children suffer. Perhaps, the film has a subtext on another issue: the movie is set in two rural communities in northern Iran and the children are subject to the whimsical cruelty of their elders and their education, as is the case for all farm kids, is compromised by labor in the fields and with animals -- agricultural chores; presumably, kids in Tehran don't suffer this sort of abuse and, maybe, the picture was promoted under auspices that urban folks are more enlightened than their country cousins. Whatever the Iranian Ministry of Children's Affairs thought it was purchasing, the government sponsors ended up with an unassuming cinema masterpieces, a picture that established Kiastorami's reputation world-wide and that became the launching pad for two other film by the director set in the same region and featuring the same people -- the devastating chronicle of a deadly earthquake that occurred three years later, "And Life goes on" and a love story, "Through the Olive Trees." "Where is the Friend's House?" is an example of ostensibly minimalist, scrupulously realistic cinema that expands in the imagination and, in fact,does what only movies can accomplish -- that is, the film embeds complex metaphysical and ethical ideas in landscapes, faces, and images made by a camera moving with subtle penetration through a series of environments that manage to be both hyper-real and, also, dreamlike and symbolic. An eight-year old boy. Achmad, sits in a shabby schoolroom next to a hapless tow-headed kid named Nematzedah. Nematzedah can't seem to bring his homework notebook to class and is mercilessly bullied by the exhausted-looking and harried school-teacher. The little kid cries and Achmad is obviously close to tears himself with sympathy for his friend. After school, when the kids are playing with chickens, donkeys and goats tethered near the school, Nematzedah falls down, hurts his knee, and, somehow, Achmad ends up with the other little boy's notebook. Discovering this back at home -- where he is bossed around by his pregnant mother and a nasty old grandmother -- Achmad decides that he has to find Netmatzedah's home and deliver the notebook to him so that the kid will not suffer the consequences of yet another day reporting to school without his notebook and homework (the teacher has made the threat to expell Nematzedah if he comes to school again unprepared, a threat casually made that doesn't seem plausible, but which terrorizes the small boys in the class. (This being Iran, there are no girls anywhere in sight -- in fact, this is true of the whole film: we see some old ladies and the ungainly pregnant mother, but no other women or girls are in the film.) The movie captures brilliantly the way that small children take adult threats literally and the way that grown-ups simply ignore little kids if they are engaged in some other activity -- throughout the film, Achmad tries to explain himself to adults who pay no attention to him at all. Achmad knows that Nematzedah lives in the next valley, across a barren mountain ridge, probably about ten minutes walk away -- the action in the film shifts between two little villages, Koker and Poshteh. So on the pretence that he is going to buy bread for the family, Achmad runs as fast as he can over the ridge, through a valley with ancient olive trees around a dry river-bed to the other village. But he can't find his friend's house. The film has no action other than the little boy searching for Nematzedah's house. There are no professional actors in the movie and the film is shot entirely on location in the two ancient-looking mud and brick villages, both of them vertical with narrow alleyways full of crumbling steps, fissures between houses where you might encounter an oxen stumbling down the terraces toward you, barren walls and tiny eroded courtyards, these places inhabited by strange adults doing inscrutable things -- one wizened old man is throwing big boulders from inside a house into the narrow alley; an old woman with a masked face who says she is sick terrorizes Achmad with her slow Mummy-like gait, her midsection and belly wrapped in some sort of ribbon-like garment. One man pesters a group of elderly guys sitting on a stoop and drinking tea about buying new doors and windows. We are like the child -- we can't figure out exactly what the men are talking about although it seems weirdly consequential and, yet, trivial at the same time. When the door salesman departs, Achmad follows him, running as fast as he can behind the man's donkey. The sequence of shots showing Achmad hurling himself down the slopes and through the valleys is repeated in exact reverse order. The door salesman turns out to be a different Nematzaeh -- it's apparently a common name -- and Achmad ends up in the alien village after dark, the wind howling in a fearsome way on the mountaintops, and dogs threatening him. With a kindly old man, they look for the friend's house, but the old fellow can barely walk and the endless up and down flights of irregular stairs confounds him so that time seems to move in slow motion and, as the clock ticks, the little boy is becoming increasingly panicked since it is now dark and the lights are lit in the houses and he still has to cross the night-time valley and the barren ridge to get to his home. Kiarostami uses no establishing shots -- in the alien village, everything seems strange and threatening, although objectively both Poshteh and Koker are identical in appearance. The soundtrack is a melange of howling dogs, clucking chickens, bleating sheep and strange pounding and knocking noises. The film's color-scheme is an austere, institutional blue and green, the color of an old elementary school cafeteria, and Kiastorami uses the bizarre technique (a method that David Bordwell has called "parametric film-making) of unifying the film's pictorial aspect by focusing his camera on doors and thresholds and window frames -- the only adult we see is a door salesman and the film begins with an extended shot of a closed door and there are innumerable images in the picture that foreground doors and windows. We see the world through the eyes of the small boy, but without any condescension -- there are no low-angle shots, nothing to make the adults loom over the little kids, no pictorial devices emphazing a child's point of view. The adults aren't giants; they aren't even people; they're just obstacles to be evaded, as stony as the mountain villages, like a kind of harsh meteorology that must be endured. (At the end of the film, the teacher's whose bullying has triggered all the film's action doesn't seem to even know the names of the two kids who are the principals in the story.) The camera never departs from the child's viewpoint -- hence, we simply don't see beyond the Achmad's horizon: for this reason the film's pictorial grammar is, at once, radically impoverished -- no establishing shots, no camera arias, no ethnography (we don't really have a sense for how these village look or how they fit into the landscape) and the scenes of the boy traversing the landscape always follow the same shot-for-shot pattern -- and, yet, simultaneously, we get a miraculous sense of how the child perceives this world, how it is dangerous and casually cruel to him, how he manages to survive in the face of the great and howling indifference that all of us experience when we go out alone into the world.