Where Is The Friend’s Home? by Abbas Kiarostami (1987)is a simple film about an eight years old boy named Nematzadeh who is on a journey to return a notebook to his classmate, or else his classmate would be expelled if his homework is not written in the notebook one more time. Along the way, Nematzadeh faces obstruction from adults who think that he should be doing other things instead, subliminally paralleling the contrasting differences of “importance” value of children and adults, what is significant to a child might be barely attention worthy to an adult.
Using non-actors in the film, the kids in the movie have nuances of rigidness, but this is made up by their naturalness in emotions and makes the film even closer to reality. The glum look hung on the kids’ faces when their teacher preached about the importance of completing homework and berating at them tickled me, I bet I looked like that too when my teachers could not stop the emphasis on academic achievements!
This film is classified in the group “Films Where Nothing Really Happens” for film class, and I admit that watching the movie was indeed a challenge, the film is slow paced and nothing really seems to happen. But isn’t that how most stories are? There need not to be earthshattering events that happen in our daily lives to make us realise things, we can seek epiphanies in the simplest of things, and Kiarostami’s films open our eyes to such possibilities.
In the film, there are a few scenes which consist of objects which I cannot point a finger to why they would be there and how it plays a role for the plot, they are as followed:
References:
Old School Reviews by John Nesbit –Where Is The Friend’s Home? (1986)
Where Is The Friend’s Home? – Wikipedia
Where Is The Friend’s Home? (1987) – IMDb
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