Seeing Is Believing
• DVD/★ DEBUT
• BLU-RAY/★ DEBUT
▶ STREAMING
▶ EXCLUSIVE TO VOD
★★ The Koker Trilogy: Three Films by Abbas Kiarostami
Where Is the Friend’s House?, 1987; And Life Goes On, 1992; Through the Olive Trees, 1994; The Criterion Collection
IN THE LATE ’80S AND EARLY ’90S, THE FILMS OF THE KOKER trilogy—Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees—elevated Abbas Kiarostami to the pantheon of the world’s great filmmakers and inaugurated a path toward his now well-known austere style, humanistic philosophy, and modernist self-reflexivity. All three are now available in a new set from Criterion (as well as in a touring retrospective that begins July 26).
Where Is the Friend’s House? is depicted through the eyes of a little boy desperate to find his classmate; yet on the way he encounters a variety of villagers, allowing the director to represent a wider swath of daily life and explore the meaning of friendship. Kiarostami twice leaves the boy’s perspective to focus on two of the older men in the village, through them contrasting rigid social orthodoxies and humanist values.
The paradoxes and, a film that returns to Koker, the town in northern Iran where the previous film was shot, and explores the boundaries between father and son, the urban and the rural, the beauty and destruction of nature, and ultimately fiction and documentary. The village has since experienced a catastrophic earthquake, and a fictional film director and his son have come to find that earlier film’s young star. One old man they meet says that he played a role in , yet he is forced to perform the “reality” that his house has not been destroyed. The protagonist—a surrogate for Kiarostami—replies, “After all, this house has survived, so it is real.” Reality is artifice, documentary is fiction, and, as Kiarostami once said, lying is the only way to the truth in cinema.
