And Life Goes On: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami
Screening Dates
  • October 18, 2019 6:30
  • October 20, 2019 4:30
  • October 21, 2019 6:30
New Restoration

Abbas Kiarostami had been making films, principally about children, since 1970. This sublime 1987 feature brought him to international attention. Inspired by a Sohrab Sepehri poem, and set in the northern village of Koker, the film has an eight-year-old named Ahmad discovering, to his dismay, that he has accidently taken home a school chum’s notebook. The pal faces expulsion for not doing his homework; Ahmad sets off to a nearby village in search of his friend’s house, only to encounter a labyrinthine maze of narrow alleys, winding streets, and identical-looking dwellings — and unhelpful adults who obstruct his progress at every turn. Ahmad’s odyssey, both comic mini-epic and parable of personal responsibility, achieves near-mythic proportions; the lyrical, neorealist style, convincing performances from non-professional actors, and sensitive portrayal of children’s lives showcase Kiarostami’s gifts at their finest.

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The Koker Trilogy

It was the three wonderfully lyrical, warmly humanistic films that make up the so-called “Koker Trilogy” — Where is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees — that brought Abbas Kiarostami to international attention. These three sublime features, dubbed a trilogy by critics but not by Kiarostami himself, are set in or around Koker, an earthquake-prone community in northern Iran, and are subtly interlaced: each successive film references, in playful, self-reflexive fashion, the film before it. But each is also a standalone work, intended to be appreciated entirely on its own. The self‑reflexivity found in the trilogy (and in Kiarostami’s Close-Up, made in the midst of it), the interplay between reality and artifice, documentary and drama, the exploration of cinematic “truth,” are hallmarks of the director’s mature and most lauded work.