| Where Is the Friend's House? | |
| Director: | Abbas Kiarostami |
| Producer: | Ali Reza Zarrin |
| Starring: |
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| Cinematography: | Farhad Saba |
| Editing: | Abbas Kiarostami |
| Runtime: | 83 minutes |
| Country: | Iran |
| Language: | Persian |
Where Is the Friend's House?[1] (Persian: خانه دوست کجاست, Khane-ye dust kojast) is a 1987 Iranian drama film written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami. The plot depicts a conscientious schoolboy's attempt to return his friend's school notebook to his home in a neighboring village, to prevent the friend from being expelled if he fails to hand it in the next day. The film, whose title derives from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri, is the first installment in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, followed by And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, all of which take place in Koker, Iran.
Ahmad, a grade schooler, watches as his teacher berates a fellow student, Mohammad Reza, for repeatedly failing to use his notebook for his homework, threatening expulsion on the next offense. When Ahmad returns home, he realizes he's accidentally taken Mohammad Reza's notebook. Against his mother's orders, he sets out in search for Mohammad Reza's house, encountering false leads, dead ends, and distractions as he attempts to enlist adults in his search, most of whom ignore him or cannot answer his questions. When night falls and he has been unable to find his friend's house, Ahmad goes home and does the homework for his friend. The next day the homework is deemed excellent by the teacher.
Where Is the Friend's House? was Kiarostami's first film to gain major international attention.[2] It won the Bronze Leopard at the 1989 Locarno Film Festival,[3] and the Golden Plate at the Fajr Film Festival. The film is on the British Film Institute's list of 50 films to see by age 15.[4]
Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi said that "I always have this film in mind because of the director's profound perspective on filmmaking and its strange and distinct structure".[3]
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited Where Is the Friend's House? as one of his favorite films.[5] [6]
Jonathan Rosenbaum in 2015 called Kiarostami the greatest living filmmaker and called the film (along with Through the Olive Trees and And Life Goes On) "sustained meditations on singular landscapes and the way ordinary people live in them; obsessional quests that take on the contours of parables; concentrated inquiries that raise more questions than they answer; and comic as well as cosmic poems about dealing with personal and impersonal disaster. They're about making discoveries and cherishing what's in the world—including things that we can't understand".[7]
In 2016, shortly after Kiarostami's death, Werner Herzog called him "one of the all-time most wonderful filmmakers" and cited the film as one of his best.[8]