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At a time when the world is lapsing into varied forms of national fervor and environmental neglect, no artist has more to tell us about the insanity of war and the value of the natural world than the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. And yet in Sight & Sound’s 2012 poll of the top 250 films of all time, only Close-Up (1990) was included, at number 42.^[1] A great deal has been written about Kiarostami since the end of the 1990s, when he was acclaimed as the person of the decade by Film Comment. In its poll of 124 critics, scholars, filmmakers, and distributors, such luminaries as Geoff Andrew, Michel Ciment, Adrian Martin, Laura Mulvey, Bernard Tavernier, and Serge Toubiana put Kiarostami at the top of their list. Robin Wood wrote that Kiarostami’s “subtle, complex, oblique art develops further with every film,”^[2] and David Bordwell praised Through the Olive Trees (1994) as “deeply moving” and “formally adventurous,” putting Kiarostami on a par with Eisenstein, Ozu, Dreyer, and Renoir: “[Kiarostami seems] to be reinventing the history of the cinema . . . without any postmodernist bad faith—instead, a spontaneous sense of human integrity.”^[3]

For an overview of Kiarostami’s biography, career, and the international response to his films, the two best English-language studies continue to be Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 2001 Abbas Kiarostami and Belinda Coombes’s 2005 translation of The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami from Alberto Elena’s 2002 Spanish original.^[4] My book includes chapters on Kiarostami’s output after Ten (2002), the last film Elena covered and the only one even mentioned (by one critic) in the 2010 Film Comment poll, probably because Certified Copy (2010) was completed too late to be included.^[5] Readers are encouraged to consult the films discussed in this book in their presently available formats. The major films on DVD with English subtitles are Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), Close-Up, And Life Goes On (1992), Through the Olive Trees, Taste of Cherry (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), ABC Africa (2001), Ten, Shirin (2008), Certified Copy, and Like Someone in Love (2012). The Traveler (1974) is on the Close-Up DVD; The Report (1977) is on the Certified Copy DVD; Homework is on “The Koker Trilogy” DVD; Ten on Ten (2004) is on the Ten DVD; and Roads of Kiarostami (2005) and Rug (2006) are on the Shirin DVD.

Abbas Kiarostami in a publicity photo for Taste of Cherry.

Zeitgeist Films/Photofest.

In a 1997 interview at Cannes, where Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or for Best Film, Kiarostami remarked, “It’s not conscious, but now that one can see all my films as a body of work it seems that they all talk about the same things. Someone once said that every filmmaker basically makes only one film in his lifetime, but he cuts it down and offers it in cinematic installments to his audience over a period of time.”^[6] Now that we can see the rest of Kiarostami’s films more than twenty years later, we can see that even the ones he made in Italy and Japan carry through a unified vision, but in order to understand that continuity in ways that most other interpreters have neglected, we must consider the historical and cultural context that helped to shape his process. Born on June 22, 1940, Kiarostami was indelibly imprinted by the civil violence of the 1979 revolution and the agonizingly protracted Iran-Iraq War. These events shaped his view of the world much as the similarly protracted and useless Vietnam War shaped those of his generation in the United States.

In 1965 America involved itself in a Vietnamese civil war in order to prevent the Communist North from taking over the whole of the country because, according to the so-called domino theory, stopping the spread of Russian and Chinese influence anywhere in the world was crucial to national security. The result was a complete takeover of the country by the North, accompanied by an ignominious American withdrawal in 1973 following eight years of staggering carnage. In addition to 58,000 Americans, the military dead totaled 254,000 South Vietnamese and 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. The “collateral damage” included 430,000 South Vietnamese; 65,000 North Vietnamese; 300,000 Cambodian; and 62,000 Laotian civilians. An additional 42,000 Vietnamese and 20,000 Laotians were subsequently killed and continue to be killed by land mines and other undetonated explosives.^[7]

The eight-year Iran-Iraq War was equally unnecessary and horrific. It began in September 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded a province of southwestern Iran on the pretext that the region was historically part of Iraq but more pertinently because it contained a great deal of oil. By 1982 Iran recaptured the area, and for the next six years, the war was an atrocity-filled standoff. Estimates peak at approximately two million soldiers and civilians killed on both sides. The war was fueled by other countries, with Saudi Arabia contributing arms-buying power to Iraq between 1982 and 1988 to the tune of $72 billion, with which Saddam purchased weapons from Spain, France, and the United States. Ironically, the United States also covertly armed Iran to release hostages held in Lebanon and in return for Iran’s withdrawal from the war against the American-backed Contras in Nicaragua. Iran also received military assistance from Russia, China, and North Korea.

Having made the strategic error of spreading his forces too thin, Saddam proposed a complete withdrawal from Iranian territory in June 1982 and announced that he would sue for peace. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini not only refused the overture, but he also called for an Iranian invasion of Iraq that would end only when Saddam’s regime was replaced by an Iranian-style Islamic republic. Saddam’s initiatory attack and Khomeini’s furious continuation made it clear that neither leader cared about the human cost of his power lust. Finally, in July 1988, with the war in stalemate and heavy war-weariness among civilians, especially in Iran, Supreme Leader Khomeini reluctantly accepted a UN resolution that sent both countries back to the territory they had held when the war began. The ayatollah expressed his deep displeasure with this outcome in an address to the nation: “Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light. Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.”^[8]

Khomeini’s distaste for peace underlies a statement by expatriate Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf upon Kiarostami’s death: Though he “gave the Iranian cinema international credibility his films were unfortunately not seen as much in Iran” because, Makhmalbaf implies, “he was a man of life, who enjoyed living and made films in praise of life.”^[9] To understand the impact of this statement, it is helpful to briefly review the historical basis of patriotic martyrdom in Iran, a narrative to which several of Kiarostami’s films and poems are strongly averse.

After Muhammad died in 632 CE, some of his followers thought the new caliph should be his cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Ṭalib, because the prophet had no male heirs. However, at a meeting in Medina, the majority of Muslim leaders present selected Abu Bakr, a close associate of Muhammad, to lead the community. When Abu Bakr died two years later, the succession was marred by violent conflict. Bakr’s assistant, Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭab, became the second caliph, only to be assassinated by a Persian slave in 644, while his successor, the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, was killed by rebels in 656. At this point Ali, who had been both a hero in Muhammad’s military victories and the seminal scholar to whom the prophet dictated the Koran, finally assumed the caliphate, which many thought he preeminently deserved, Muhammad having said of him, “I am the city of knowledge, and Ali is its gate.”

Tragically for his followers, the Shias, whose name means “partisans of Ali,” the revered leader was assassinated in 656 at the behest of the Syrian Umayyad dynasty, whom the Shias refused to accept. Finally, in 680, the Shiite forces under Ali’s son Al-Husayn ibn Ali were defeated at Karbala in modern-day Iraq in a battle that came to define the religious identity of the Shia and the national identity of Iran.^[10] Though not divinely inspired himself, Husayn became the second great Shiite martyr, the successor in holiness to his father, whom Shias believe to have been designated by God through Muhammad as Islam’s first legitimate imam. Thereafter, the male descendants of Ali were successively revered until the disappearance of the twelfth, who never died but remains hidden “in occultation” until he returns as the Mahdi on the Day of Judgment, when he and Jesus Christ will wage triumphant war against the false messiah known to Christians as the anti-Christ.

This “Twelver” faith has been the dominant theology of Iran since the Persian Safavid dynasty established Shia Islam as its state religion in 1501. And throughout the intervening centuries, an angry sense of injustice has dominated Iran’s religious culture and motivated its ongoing jihads against Sunni rivals in the Middle East. The government’s intense animosity toward Israel since the 1979 Islamic revolution also has an infrequently remarked religious basis because Ali’s most memorable battlefield exploits occurred in a siege of the Jewish stronghold of Khaybar at a time when Muhammad was engaged in battles against Jews and pagans for political and economic supremacy in Mecca and Medina.^[11]

Shias comprise only 10 percent of Muslims worldwide, and Iran differs from other Islamic countries in having become a theocracy under the “ayatollahs,” an honorific for the most distinguished of imams who rule for life after being chosen by an elected body of scholars and clerics. Khomeini and his followers rode a tidal wave of social resentment against the shah’s westernized monarchy with the promise of divinely ordained equality under sharia law. As a persecuted minority in Sunni countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, Shiism has always thrived on an energy of resentment, which helped to fuel the 1979 Iranian revolution. The movement’s will to persist against initial setbacks was mythically energized by the legendary prowess of Ali at the battle of Khaybar and especially the heroic martyrdom epitomized by Husayn ibn Ali and his followers at Karbala in 680. The Karbala defeat is celebrated as a spiritual victory every year during the Ashura holiday through self-flagellation and emotional recitals of Husayn’s brave death. But far from being confined to Ashura, the nation’s identification with Ali and Husayn has been celebrated uninterruptedly for centuries, despite westernizing efforts during the shah’s regime to dilute it.^[12]

The Iranian national anthem exhorts the “believers in justice” to heed the imam’s “message of independence [and] freedom imprinted on [their] souls,” and to follow the path of the “Martyrs [whose] clamors echo in the ears of time, enduring, continuing, and eternal.”^[13] These sentiments lie behind the willingness of untrained and unarmed conscripts to advance in human waves during the Iraq War. While Iraqi conscripts described being beaten into military submission and witnessing executions for retreat or disobedience, many Iranians enthusiastically entered combat. Thirty-five years later, one of them recalled his spiritual patriotism despite being ordered to clear mine fields by running into them:

We loved Imam Khomeini, and when he gave the order to defend the country, we were happy to answer his call. All my generation went—and I think we went with joy. We were just young kids with Kalashnikovs and grenades—which we didn’t even dare to use at first because a lot of us were afraid to throw them! We didn’t even have bread! The logistics were terrible. But that obligation [to Khomeini] was so strong it covered everything. You’re getting shot at, killed. Sometimes they cannot find your body. It’s in pieces. And then you see that it’s an unequal war—all you have is yourselves and the other side has everything—bunkers, artillery, air force. When you do not have weaponry you have to break the enemy line with your body. Even the barbed wire—sometimes we couldn’t cut it, so we would throw ourselves upon it with our bodies so others could pass over us. Our casualties went up and up. Sometimes seventy, eighty, ninety percent of our units were destroyed. The first time I saw a grenade strike the earth I lay on the ground for several minutes, I was so afraid. But in time hundreds of grenades were coming—and I didn’t mind. You adapt and get used to war. You start to recognize which bullet is passing you and which bullet is in front of you. You become more professional.

But despite permanent injuries—plastic knee joints and a bullet lodged in his hand—this veteran felt that his nation’s religious revolution was a cause worth dying for: “I think it was beautiful. It was a very elegant moment. I would rather die in that moment than live after the war. It was so nice.”^[14]

Nothing about the war was nice for Kiarostami. Though some of his work shows a passionate commitment to social justice, he did not participate in the revolution and later remarked that he never wanted to see blood running through the streets again.^[15] In a rare direct reference to the revolution at the beginning of Close-Up, he has a former fighter-pilot-turned-cab-driver refer to an incident at the Lavizan Air Force barracks when shah loyalists fired on deserting comrades as a way of saying that postrevolutionary society has turned against the poor, personified by his real-life antihero, Hossein Sabzian.^[16] Kiarostami expressed his hatred of war covertly in Taste of Cherry and Shirin, but in several brief poems, he could not have been more direct:

One hundred obedient soldiers

entering the barracks.

Moonlit night.

Disobedient dreams.^[17]

The commander’s uniform

in the closet

was consumed by moths.

Commander

and commanded

Both injured.

Both hungry.

Both reluctant.

The soldier who blew the trumpet

did it badly.

The sharp tongued commander

hurled invectives

during morning parade.^[18]

The soldier who placed his fingers in his ears

While the artillery was firing

lost his fingers

and his ears

and his eyes

in the blink of an eye.

Injured soldiers

Wandering.

Groaning and bloody.^[19]

Kiarostami edited his 1989 documentary Homework to expose the intimidating effects of militant Shiite theology on children and families. Initially hired as a graphic designer in 1969, Kiarostami went on to make short and feature-length films for Kanun, the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, until 1988: “We were supposed to make films that dealt with childhood problems. At the beginning it was just a job, but it was the making of me as an artist.”^[20] During his tenure at Kanun, Kiarostami must have reflected on the relationship between the personal lives of the children he filmed and the disconnect in the larger society between people who address each other on the street as “brother” and “sister” but do not treat each other as family: “Once you are unable to solve your internal problems, they pour out into the streets. I certainly believe these intra-family relationships and problems are social problems—as the partners [at home], a husband and a wife, leave home every morning and become members of society.”^[21]

Ostensibly a documentary about the education of first- and second-graders, Kiarostami’s editing gives the title a resonance that applies to the nation as a whole. Thirty years later, in his final feature, Like Someone in Love, he has a retired Japanese police inspector praise his former sociology professor for a book that examines the “topic of violence in society.” Later in the same film, the professor corrects a college student’s confusion of Charles Darwin with Emile Durkheim, who wrote an exemplary sociological essay on suicide, a trope that applies to humanity collectively in Kiarostami’s later work.^[22] Homework is an early version of how the filmmaker envisioned the genesis of fear and anger in early childhood. It is also part of an ongoing look at what children learn outside of or in spite of school, notably portrayed in such films as The Traveler, And Life Goes On, The Wind Will Carry Us, and Where Is the Friend’s House?

Homework’s beginning is deceptively pleasant. A long, irregular procession of briefcase-carrying children in bright winter jackets, all happy and smiling, saunters past Kiarostami and his crew. Several ask what the film is about, and an adult voice is heard asking if it’s a feature film, to which Kiarostami replies, “No, it’s more like a documentary, but you can’t tell until the film is made.” More kids come up, and the director asks if they’ve done their homework. One boy teases the others, “My homework’s better than theirs!” These initial shots show older children unperturbed by the assignments that younger children are afraid to discuss later in the film.

Another adult voice asks if this will be a sequel to First Graders (1984), a previous Kiarostami documentary he saw on television. Again, the reply is evasive: “It’s not clear yet. We’ll see when we get into it. It’s based on impressions. We’re just starting today. I came across a problem when I was helping my own son with homework.” Then he adds a comment that proves to be retrospectively pointed, not just about the parents of these children, but also about power relationships in the whole society extending up to Khomeini: “Homework is supposed to be for kids, but adults are even more involved, so I thought I’d bring a camera to see what’s going on. It’s not a movie in the usual sense. It’s more of a research project.”

The camera cuts to a large group of boys entering the school courtyard, where their vocal cacophony is abruptly silenced by a sharp whistle. The camera cuts from a close-up of the colorfully clad children to an aerial shot in which they have been reduced to tiny dots massed against nearby mountains in a symbolic grayness, where only the students and a line of trees are black. The camera returns to the courtyard, where an older boy and male adult stand facing the rows of students who begin to shout in unison, “Islam is victorious! Down with the East and the West!” The line immediately locates the children in the center of a hostile world, perhaps alluding to non-Shiite enemies in light of the Koranic passage: “Unto Allah belong the East and the West, and whithersoever ye turn, there is Allah’s countenance” (Koran 2:115).

Then the teacher shouts, “Say your prayer!” eliciting a profession of loyalty to Ali, the first legitimate imam, who, as the husband of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, resided with the prophet: “Oh, Allah! Bless Muhammad and his household!” The camera then moves behind a black-robed woman at left-center, the one female figure in the image, a disciplinarian who foreshadows the abusive mothers later mentioned by the children (in contrast to Fatima), as the students recite the overture to all Muslim prayers: “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.”

The rest of the prayer puts the children in a metaphysical plight that reflects the social and familial plight that their interviews reveal. Each line is spoken by the leader and then repeated by the group: “By the declining day. Lo! Man is in a state of loss. Save those who believe and do good works. And exhort one another to truth.” This is repeated with the variation “exhort one another to endurance.” Then the whistle blows, and the children run in place. The adult voice chants, “One and two and three and four,” and the children respond, “Two and three and four and five!” When they switch from running in place to jumping up and down, the prayer becomes more militant: “The warriors are victorious. Three and four and five and six. Saddam’s followers are doomed.” The cycles of numbers keep overlapping, reducing the children to anonymity and potential cannon fodder: “One and two and three and four, two and three and four and five, three and four and five and six, Saddam’s followers are doomed. Muslims are victorious!”

The last part of the prayer decisively separates the Iranian nation from the Sunni Saddam, most of whose troops ironically were Shiite. But the more immediate tragic irony is in pushing these vulnerable children to emulate only the warrior side of Ali rather than Ali, the transcriber of the Koran. Each of the leader’s rhetorical shouts triggers the same response. The endearing faces of the school-bound children in the opening scene have now visually and vocally become a Pavlovian mass: “The first imam?—Is Ali!—Lion-hearted one?—Is Ali!—Conqueror of Khaybar?—Is Ali!” The mass begins to break up, and the students are shown from various angles entering the school in single file. The chant of those still in the courtyard continues, even though the students now shown in close-up as they pass the camera flash individual smiles. At this point, the whistle heard in the background no longer matches the image. The contrast establishes the thematic difference between social conditioning and individual sensitivity that the children retain before the conditioning finally reduces many of them to the mindlessly aggressive adults described in the subsequent interviews.

Just before the interviews begin, a woman’s voiceover reports that, on the third day of shooting, the Kanun team received 526 of 856 questionnaires that had been sent to parents asking how pupils did their homework:

More than 37 percent of the parents couldn’t help their children due to illiteracy. Of the literate parents, a large percentage couldn’t help their children because they were too tense, busy, exhausted, or impatient. Many parents had been asking the teachers to excuse them from the responsibility of helping their children with their homework. Through the interviews and questionnaires, we got to know the children who had special circumstances.

Interviews with the children themselves reveal that many had been slapped in the face or beaten with a belt and had never heard the word encouragement.

Sitting at a table with his cameraman beside him, Kiarostami elicits and later edits in responses that make the children’s reports of personal violence part of a much larger picture. One boy reports that his family attends the cinema every Thursday. In a movie that particularly impressed him, he saw men fighting in a boat. Instead of answering directly when Kiarostami asks if fighting in a boat is a good thing, the boy vividly recalls what he saw: “Two Iranians are sitting in a boat, and two Iraqis come to try to capture them. One of the Iranians gets smart and says you can’t beat me, and he pushed one of them. Then he cut the man’s head off and threw him into the sea.” Kiarostami asks if he liked this. The boy says yes and goes on: “Then the place where he—” but Kiarostami interrupts, saying, “Wait, listen. You like fighting in films?” to which the boy replies, “I like it if it’s in the war.”

Apparently, the boy finds cinematic violence comforting because it frames and distances the violence he has witnessed at home. When Kiarostami asks if he likes fighting at home, too, the boy says no and describes the conflict between his mother, who is his father’s second wife, and his stepmother, who is the first wife and lives downstairs. When Kiarostami asks if they fight each other, the boy hesitates for a long time: “Sometimes they tease each other and argue.” Kiarostami asks if this upsets him. “Sometimes my mum beats her up.” Then Kiarostami asks if he is glad his mum is stronger. The boy answers indirectly by describing an internecine war that parallels the national one: “My stepmother has a son who’s done his military service. My dad takes their side, and my grandpa takes my mother’s side. My grandpa is the strongest, even stronger than my dad. In a fight the other day, the first wife’s father came, and her son came and beat my mum. Then my cousin came and beat up my [half-]brother who, was beating up my mum.”

Though the boy says he liked that, he doesn’t like the constant general fighting because he’s “not old enough to fight yet.” When Kiarostami asks if he will fight when he grows up, the boy answers with a question of his own: “Don’t they fight at the front?” His reply conflates the government narrative of noble martyrdom with the primal hostility he has known at home. Kiarostami answers, “The fight at the front is different. It’s war.” The boy asks, “What’s the difference?” Kiarostami repeats, “The fight at the front is different. It’s war.” The boy says, “The difference is that we must kill.” Another first-grader who displaces his personal rage into fantasies of war reports that his second-grade brother is supposed to help him with his homework but beats him up instead. His mother also beats him with a belt. When asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he says a pilot so that he can kill Saddam. Like most citizens of nations engaged in patriotic wars, he imagines the enemy nation’s leader to be the cause rather than just a symptom of the universal conflict he already knows.

The physical destruction the boy mentions transparently describes the mental state of the “house” where he lives: “Saddam is cruel because he destroys houses. He ruins them.” And the boy’s subsequent fantasy of an alternative future is so pointedly symbolic that Kiarostami might have written the dialogue himself: “And if Saddam is dead by then, what will you be?” After a long pause, the boy says, “The ones whose heart doesn’t work, who go to the hospital and lie down to have an operation.”—“You want to operate on them and be a physician?”—“Yes, a pilot and a physician, both.”

In a brief intercut to the children with their jackets open later in the day, once again shouting “Islam is victorious. Down with the East and the West,” the black-robed woman is shown walking forward between the rows of students. She reaches toward one of them, but before we know why, the camera cuts to a close-up of a child uncontrollably crying at the interview table. He is desperately afraid to face the filmmakers alone and is calling for his friend because apparently, in the absence of a loving relationship with his parents and teachers (as in the 1987 feature film Where Is the Friend’s House?), he has transferred his need for affection to a peer. Kiarostami dismisses him temporarily and brings in the friend, “Why is he so afraid?” The friend cannot explain the boy’s home life and seems to improvise an answer: The teacher beat them with a ruler, and when the ruler broke, she replaced it with a cane. So the boy thought Kiarostami might have a hidden ruler.

In fact, it is the harsh rule-bound society that has traumatized some children more than others. The camera cuts back to the students lined up in the courtyard as a male teacher chants, “Oh Allah, bless Muhammad and his household!” The households of most of these children, or at least the ones Kiarostami has chosen to show, appear not to be blessed. The household of the prayer is that of Muhammad, Ali, and Fatima. The teacher’s voice continues, “Boys, this is Fatima Day, as you all know. We all know Hazrat Fatima, may God bless her soul, daughter of the holy prophet, wife of Hazrat Ali, God bless his soul, the first imam of Shia Muslims. I’m going to sing a song you all know.”

Just before he starts to sing, we see a startling close-up of a boy whose face is covered by a black scarf as if he were a militant martyr. The image synchronizes with the song’s first phrase as the man and the children begin together: “In the rose garden of the martyrs.” The sequence of image and word implies that all the children who have been individualized in close-up interviews are now potential martyrs in the Shia war against Saddam. As they sing, the children are shown swinging their arms back and forth over their hearts in unison, but the voices of some apparently less-obedient children in the background show that not all may be ready to martyr themselves at Khomeini’s call.

The edited emphasis on Fatima is ironically appropriate at this point. She represents all things that the parents, the school, and the society are not. Like Christianity’s Mary, she is the queen of Heaven, known during her lifetime for sharing her father’s compassion for the poor and for interceding on behalf of suffering innocents like the children in Homework. Her presence in a film about educating children is powerfully ironic because the rose garden in the song represents the potential blossoming that seems so unlikely for the children in the film. When Fatima was a little girl, a wind miraculously blew four seeds into her hand as she walked in the desert. She planted them and watered them with her saliva and morning dew, and they produced four bushes, each carrying roses of a different color—white, red, blue, and gold. They represented the virtues that would combine in her and that she would inspire in others: white for spirituality and healing, red for spontaneity and creation, blue for discernment and service to others, and gold for restoring equality and promoting peace.^[23]

This poetic allusion that Kiarostami probably did not plan (though he knew he would shoot on Fatima Day) perfectly contrasts with a conversation between himself and an educated parent who inveighs against the rule-bound nature of the education system and, by implication, of the society as a whole. He says that in England, for example, the homework assignments are creative projects, including handicrafts and composition. Education experts in Japan, he says, have noted that rote homework assignments of the sort used in Iran caused the suicide rate among children to rise, but in Iran the “kids are under great pressure, [and while the] teachers are trained to handle this at home, we don’t know how to deal with it and dump our frustration on them.” The result will be an “indignant, surly, and defensive generation susceptible to every mental problem [and] with so much pressure and unhappiness, we’ll end up with a generation devoid of creativity, capable only of copying.”

Many of the man’s views coincide with those of Kiarostami in Where Is the Friend’s House? and The Traveler: “Kids should be left to themselves at home. Otherwise they will build up natural pressure against the education system. They should be allowed to be naughty, to rebel, and develop their own ways of resisting rules and regulations.” He often argues with his wife about whether their child needs to get the highest grade. She insists that their son should be the top pupil in every subject, but he describes his child as talented in music and art but not in “subjects like history, which require memorization.” Last, and with conclusive emphasis, he does not approve of all subjects, “even literature [being] taught from a religious perspective,” and he predicts that the twenty-first century will be different.

After a brief shot of the panicky boy still crying for his friend, the scene returns briefly to the courtyard, where some unintended humor provides a promising sign that the school’s effort to robotize the students has mostly failed. After the kids begin another war chant, Kiarostami suddenly cuts the sound, explaining in voiceover, “In spite of the great care taken by the authorities to run the ceremony properly, due to the children’s mischievous manner and lack of comprehension, it was performed inappropriately. Out of respect for the ritual, we opted to delete the sound from this section of the film.” But the visual images humorously reverse the meaning of the words, instilling hope that the creative spontaneity traditionally associated with the nurturing Fatima and called for by the anonymous parent may not be universally quelled.

In the expressionistic ambience that the silence creates, some boys properly stare ahead as they swing their arms up and down, marching in place but going nowhere. Others march but start to look around, while still others do not march at all. A boy in a white sweater stands still and just pats his heart repeatedly. Another reaches over to tweak a boy in the adjoining row. After a minute and twenty seconds of subversion intensified by the artificial silence, the sound returns, accentuating Kiarostami’s sympathy with “naughty” boys who resist authority.

Kiarostami’s inclusion of his interlocutor’s protest against teaching everything from a religious perspective informs the film’s extraordinary final scene. In it the director’s editing expresses a vision evident throughout his later work of God as a creative source rather than a political enforcer. Except for a brief profile shot at the beginning, Kiarostami’s questions have been accompanied only by an image of the camera lens. Here, as if he were making a personal statement, he replaces the lens with his own face. First, he calls back the fearful boy. Then he brings in his friend to stand behind him. Shifting back and forth from one foot to the other, the boy denies that he is still afraid but then wavers when Kiarostami asks if he can send the friend back to class: “No. Yes, yes, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The friend leaves, and the boy begins to cry again, Kiarostami asks, “Shall I call him back?” Waving his finger in the air pathetically, the boy says, “Yes.” When the friend returns, Kiarostami tells him to stand close behind the first boy, and now again, as the director speaks, we see only the camera.

Still waving his index finger in the air as a sign of supplication and clearly wanting to end the interview, the boy says his religion class is about to start. Kiarostami asks if he knows the answers. “No,” he replies, none of them. The boy just wants to get away from Kiarostami, whom he perceives as another threatening authority figure. He starts to get upset again when Kiarostami catches him in contradictions: “Did you prepare for the lesson?”—“I did.”—“Do know the questions?”—“No.”—“Is that why you want to go?”—“Yes.” As soon as Kiarostami tells the friend he can leave again, the boy tearfully protests, “No, I go first. Then he goes.” When Kiarostami promises he will let the boy go if he tells them why he is afraid of them, the boy inadvertently voices his fear of resisting any adult: “I don’t want to miss religion class.”

Coming full circle, Kiarostami and the boy are shown again, separated by the desk just as he was separated from his subject in the first interview. After so much misery, the ending is unexpectedly moving and beautiful. When Kiarostami asks him if he remembers any of his religious lessons, he says he can recite the prayer “Oh Lord.” As the boy speaks, we see only the camera lens rather than the director, as if to say that viewers can receive the ending however they wish: “Oh Lord! Oh thou, Lord of beautiful stars. Oh thou, Lord of colorful cosmos. O thou who created Venus.” At this point, soft orchestral music replaces strident voices in the hall. The music gets louder as the boy proceeds, creating a genuinely spiritual moment, a paean to creation rather than authority: “Thou who created the moon and the sun, all the mountains, hills, and oceans, the beautiful and colorful trees, beautiful wings for the butterfly, nests for the birds, happiness, games, strength, eyes for us to see, snow and rain, heat and cold. We’re all created by you, oh Lord. You granted all I wished for. Fill our hearts with happiness and joy.”

As the music continues to swell, the boy’s voice cracks, as if he were involuntarily moved. Just before the end, the camera backs up slightly so that both the boy and his friend are illuminated in the dark frame. With this expressionistic chiaroscuro highlighting their individual love, choral voices join the music, auguring a redefinition of the individual in relation to the nation and nations in relation to each other. As the final credits roll and the music becomes stirringly loud, the image of the boys remains as a still photograph, which, in spite of everything, affirms the constancy of cosmic love.

The credits’ final words read, “This film was made in February 1987 at Shahid Massoumi School for the Institute of Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.” In retrospect, the words are ironic because Kiarostami was obviously not guiding the children in a direction the country’s Islamic guides approved. In a 2005 interview, he revealed that he cut the sound during the playground chant to appease objecting religious groups and that the film was banned in Iran for three years after its initial release and thereafter shown only to adults: “After I made Homework I was forced to leave Kanun because they disagreed with the film.”^[24] Eventually, Kiarostami would have to leave the country to make films, though he continued to live there.