Have You Seen It?

Country of Origin: Iran. The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children presents a film produced by Ali Reza Zarrin. Starring Babak Ahmadpour (Ahmad Ahmadpour), Ahmed Ahmadpour (Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh), Khodabaksh Defai (the Teacher), and Iran Outari (Mother). Written, directed, and edited by Abbas Kiarostami. Running time: 83 minutes.

Abbas Kiaraostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? is a suspenseful drama about an eight-year-old boy and his efforts to return a fellow student’s homework notebook to him in a neighboring village. Typically, this would be an uncommon subject to be described as suspenseful unless you remember what it was like to be a child subjected to a much larger adult-dominated world. Abbas Kiarostami remembers this well and the child actors are well-cast as we get to see the world from their perspectives.

At the beginning of the film, a student named Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh has completed his homework on a sheet of paper instead of in the required notebook. He truthfully tells the teacher that he left his notebook at his cousin’s. His cousin, who is also in the classroom, vouches for him. Despite this, the teacher takes Nematzadeh’s assignment, tears it to shreds, and tells him that if he fails one more time to complete his assignment in the notebook, he will be expelled from school. Being emotionally distraught over this, he breaks into tears.

Ahmad Ahmadpour, who sits next to Nematzadeh, accidentally takes home Mohammed Reza Nematzahed’s notebook as well as his own. Upon realizing his error once he is at home, Ahmad tells his mother, “I took Mohammed Reza’s notebook. I have to go give it back.”

“Go do your homework. Then you can play,” she says to him.

“I don’t want to play. I want to return his notebook.”

“You just make excuses for not doing your homework.”

“He’ll get expelled,” he tries to explain.

“He deserves to get expelled,” his mother says. “Stay right there and do your homework or I’ll smack you. You’re just wasting time. Go get some bread. Your dad will deal with you when he gets home.”

As Ahmad is a goodhearted kid who understands what the negative consequences of not returning the notebook that day to Mohammed Reza Nematzadeh will be for his fellow student, he defies his mother and leaves the familiar terrain of the village of Koker for the neighboring but unknown village of Poshteh. These are poor, rural villages where, if you are lucky, you have a horse for transportation. If you are an eight-year-old, the neighboring village is almost as foreign as another country. It is against these challenges that Ahmad sets out to return the school notebook.

The well-cast child actors help us to remember what being a child was like. They don’t give performances as much as effective, credible presences. We look in their eyes and we know what they are going through. It is easy to forget that children are as affected by their surroundings as adults and that it is harder for a child to do what he or she knows to be right when your life is subject to the more powerful push and pull of the adult world.

One of this film’s virtues is its ability to see the world from an eight-year-old’s perspective. From that point of view, a child exists in an adult’s world, frequently being told “do your homework” but then as he begins doing it, he’s told to get something for his baby brother, get the laundry basket, go get some bread, and so on. Every attempt by the child to do the right thing is challenged by a more powerful adult to do something other than what he knows to be right.

In addition to this theme of being a child in an adult-dominated world, the movie also addresses the passage of the old giving way for the new. An elderly carpenter who had made the wood doors and baby cribs for many in the area, including the baby crib of Ahmad’s father, has lived long enough to see his craft and artistry removed and replaced with heartless iron doors.

Where Is the Friend’s House? is a film that reminds us that the experience of being a child in an adult-dominated world is one that crosses borders. It also takes an unlikely subject for a movie, a boy who wants to return a notebook to his schoolmate who will face expulsion without it, and turns it into a film of drama and suspense with moral ramifications. Where Is the Friend’s House? is a find.