Country of Origin: Iran. The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children presents a film written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami and produced by Ali Reza Zarrin. Starring Farhad Kheradmand (Film Director) and Pouya Payvar (Pouya). Running time: 95 minutes.
Abbas Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On is about a film director and his son who are in search of two of the child actors from Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), the first film in the Koker Trilogy, in the aftermath of the 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake which took at least 35,000 lives and destroyed around 700 villages. Farhad Kheradmad plays the fictionalized director of that film (in reality, Abbas Kiarostami) and Pouya Payvar plays the director’s son. This is the second installment of Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy; Through the Olive Trees is the third.
The interaction between the father/film director and his son Pouya is on-target and realistic for an adult parent and child relationship. The boy asks his father frequent questions: “What is that?” His father: “A cement factory.” Son: “Why didn’t the earthquake destroy that?” Father: “It can’t be destroyed by an earthquake.” Son: “But weren’t the houses made of cement destroyed?”
The father’s patient if pat answers are subverted by his son’s honest curiosity. The son: “Are you sure this is the right road?” The father: “Every road leads somewhere.” The son: “What about a dead end?” These verbal exchanges create a muted comic element that works well with the seriousness of the search they are conducting.
The setting of the film is catastrophic: buildings are reduced to rubble and the frequent sounds of helicopters, sirens, and babies crying add to the emotional distress. As the director encounters strangers along the way, he asks, “Have you seen this boy?” and shows them a picture of the star of Where Is the Friend’s House? He might also ask rather pointed questions: How did you live through this? Do you know anyone who died? How did they die? With the film’s progression, something interesting happens: the director and his son meet people who are experiencing the physical devastation of their homes and the emotional devastation of having lost loved ones, but are finding ways to re-establish normality in their lives. They may be trying to redeem what material belongings have survived the earthquake, to focus on the loved ones who have lived, or even to set up a tv antenna on a hill so the survivors in a village can watch the televised World Cup. The multitude of stories and experiences we get exposed to over the quick ninety-five minute running time of the film has a quietly persistent effect: the tendency of people in the direst circumstances to choose hope.
Like Where Is the Friend’s House?, this film expresses a love of the natural landscape that the characters inhabit. This time around, the long shots of the natural terrain are more extreme in their scope and create some of the film’s most emotional images of defeat, of hope, and of charity.
And Life Goes On creates poetic images of Iran’s landscape, a believable parent-child relationship, and memorable scenes from basic human interactions like one person asking about another’s experiences in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake. In the vision of Abbas Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On, in a setting of rubble and ruin, hope and life assert themselves by the human choices the characters make.
Leave a Reply