And Life Goes On: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami
- Homework
- Mashgh-e shab
- Iran1989
- Abbas Kiarostami
- 78 DCP
- NR
Screening Dates
- October 21, 2019 8:10
- October 27, 2019 6:30
“Only Kiarostami could turn a documentary about homework into a delightful, absorbing, and stirring portrait of the ‘human condition.’”
James Quandt, TIFF
A small miracle of documentary filmmaking, Kiarostami’s Homework turns straightforward style and simple subject matter into sublime cinema. The film features a series of interviews with little boys, who offer their opinions about school homework. In Kiarostami’s masterful hands, this becomes the stuff of an alternately playful and poignant portrait of childhood — and of parent-child relations, adult insensitivity, economic inequality, and an educational system that frequently fails its charges. The film, made for Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (aka Kanoon), Kiarostami’s longtime sponsor, displeased the Iranian authorities, who held up its release. Undone homework had triggered the plot of Where is the Friend’s House?, Kiarostami’s 1987 charmer and international breakthrough.
