Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1987 • Iran
The first film in Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime, interlacing KOKER TRILOGY takes a simple premise—a boy searches for the home of his classmate, whose school notebook he has accidentally taken—and transforms it into a miraculous, child’s-eye adventure of the everyday. As our young hero zigzags determinedly across two towns, aided (and sometimes misdirected) by those he encounters, his quest becomes both a revealing portrait of rural Iranian society in all its richness and complexity and a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility. Sensitive and profound, WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE? is shot through with all the beauty, tension, and wonder a single day can contain.
Up Next in Abbas Kiarostami’s Childhood Films
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Homework
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1989 • Iran
In Abbas Kiarostami’s second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, probing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there. It emerges t...
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And Life Goes On
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1992 • Iran
Starring Farhad Kheradmand, Pouya Payvar, Hossein RezaiIn the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that left fifty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returned to Koker, where his camera surveys not only devastation but also the teeming life in its wak...
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ABC Africa
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2001 • Iran
Starring Abbas Kiarostami, Seifollah SamadianIn 2000, Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS. Wo...
