My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 13): Drama in Rural Iran

The Koker Trilogy

Where is the Friend’s House? (1987)

And Life Goes On (1992)

Through the Olive Trees (1994)

Written and Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

In the 1970s, just before the Iranian revolution, a group of young Iranian directors began experimenting with new forms of filmmaking that would create new artistic visions, but also reflect local Iranian culture. This “Iranian New Wave” was interrupted by the revolution in 1979. Several of the directors fled to Europe in the face of censorship. But the most well-known, Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), stayed in his country and spend two decades making films that focused on the traditions and people of Iran—not the new religious leaders, but instead life for the everyday person. These films have a remarkable, unique presence and style, making this director famous, admired by such renowned colleagues as Akira Kurosawa. His methods were extreme—for example he gets one of the local boy-actors to plaintively cry three minutes into the movie, apparently by misleading him that his best friend was not going to visit him that night as anticipated. That said, he gets wonderful, naturalistic acting from these amateurs, making us wonder if we are seeing cinema or documentary.

The three films were not intended as a trilogy, but the director came to accept this grouping later. Koker is the rural northern Iranian town where much of the action is centered. This is a mountainous area near the Caspian Sea, near Armenia. There are regional dialects and a conservative, variably literate peasant culture, even though Teheran is only 200 miles away. The region was devastated by an earthquake in 1990, and the second two films show villages, roads, and families in ruins, as the quake killed over 50,000 people, include many of the family members of the characters depicted in the first film. The films interlink in intriguing ways. We see a steep path up a hillside multiple times, ditto an olive grove, and each time these return we have a sigh of remembrance from the event that transpired there in the earlier movie, much as we each have our own memories of place and time associated with locales from our past. The first film Where is the Friend’s House? is a fictional movie made with locals as the actors, including the amazing Babek Ahmedpour as Ahmed, the young protagonist who spends the entire film trying to return a notebook to his friend in another village. In the second film And Life Goes On we see another quest, this time of the fictional director of the first film in a quasi-documentary driving through the ruined Iranian cities after the earthquake, returning to Koker to try to locate the little boys who starred in his earlier film. Typical of Kiarostami, we do not get a clear happy ending, and never find out if he locates the boy. This film looks like a documentary, but again is made with local actors. The final film Through the Olive Trees mixes documentary and film, with yet another different fictional director making a new movie in the ruined town of Koker, but using some of the same actors that we met in the first two movies. Ahmed from the first film, now seven years older, hangs around in this film trying to help, but is no longer the star. The mixture of venues, people, fact, fiction, and the very real carnage wrought by the real earthquake create a dream-like mix of reality and make believe. This is all enhanced by the beautiful filming of the mountains, plains, and people that make the region itself the real star.

The best stand-alone film in the trilogy is the first, Where is the Friend’s House?. The plot is very simple, and is experienced through the eyes of the eight year old protagonist Ahmed. The film begins and ends in a school classroom, where the tyrannical teacher berates the students, enforces rigid rules, and demands they complete their homework in specifically-formatted notebooks. But, Ahmed mistakenly takes his friend’s notebook home, and immediately frets that his friend will be punished the next day if he does not return the notebook to him so the homework can be done correctly. Amazingly, the rest of the film is almost entirely the recounting of the short journey of Ahmed to a nearby village to find his friend (fruitlessly, it turns out—another failed quest). The village is 2 miles away, but might as well be on another continent in the eyes of a child (and of us, as we join the trek). His search follows a beautiful trail over hills, through olive groves, and across shimmering fields similar to a Tarkovsky scene from the Russian outback. He meets colorful villagers, accompanies a lonely old man on a tour of the unfamiliar village, and endures a windstorm, yet never quite tracks his friend down, similar to a dream in which you keep seeking something but never get there. The entirely non-professional cast is remarkable. When, at the end, Ahmed resourcefully does his friend’s homework for him in the notebook and slips it to him in class, and the teacher awards his friend a high grade, Ahmed’s and our satisfaction is supreme. Such a simple story, yet so poignant, somehow due to the pacing, art direction, and human direction of Kiarostami. The world of the eight-year-old boy is entered completely…short distances seem long, short time periods seem endless, small events trivial to adults are crucial. This is a remarkable film.

The other two films may not make as much sense to see on their own, given their odd documentary-drama style, but paired with Where is the Friend’s House? as an anchor for them, they fit together beautifully, if unpredictably. In the second film the search of the director for Ahmed takes him to a ruined village, where he meets a young man who married his wife the day after the deadly earthquake (“life goes on, and now there are no family to complicate things”). But wait! In the third film it turns out this “meeting” with the young man is actually a filmed scene from a different movie being made by the different director—or are both directors actually stand-ins for Kiarostami, the real director?. Is the young man’s marriage fictional? Well, the actor playing the role of the young husband is actually trying to convince the actress playing his wife to marry him for real, and spends the third film pursuing her, including following the very same footpath used by Ahmed in the first film. What is real, and what is filmed? Acted out in front of the beautiful scenery and ruined villages with footage of real people determinedly digging their lives out from under the rubble, the whole thing takes on a gently surreal character. It reminded me very much of a similarly surreal experience I had in the Karakoram range in Pakistan in the late 1990s, when, returning with a small group from a trek, we had to stop our jeeps because an entire town was buried under 7 feet of mud from a storm. As in this film, there was no weeping or drama. People started digging out, boys played soccer, vendors tried to sell us pens. Did I actually experience this, or am I dreaming it? These films create the same dilemma.

 As a group, the Koker Trilogy is a uniquely creative achievement—three films, linked geographically and spiritually, with different plots but overlapping actors, similar to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s contemporaneous Three Colours Trilogy (Blue, Red, White, 1993-4). Just as in this director, and the USSR’s Tarkovsky, Kiarostami transcends a repressive political regime to make innovative, challenging art.