The film is a lot more than an easy rehashing of Italian neorealist traditions; it is rich in symbolism and poetic form.
The Iranian cinema is considerable with movies about children (The White Balloon and Children of Heaven being the two classic famous examples). Where Is the Friend’s Home? in many respects started the style of Iranian child-themed movies and is the most culturally massive to date for a variety of reasons. Foremost, it was the first movie in a few decades to garner interest outside Iran.
It is ostensibly a neorealist movie in the style of Bicycle Thieves: a younger boy needs to return his friend’s notebook or his classmate will be expelled from school. Shot on location, using non-actors, presenting an impossible-quest narrative to expose the ambiguity of life, no less the movie seems extraordinarily simple as a social critique of Iranian tradition towards the treatment of children.
This movie might also appear too simple to warrant a movie narrative. Yet, Kiarostami's style of storytelling described the rhythms and profound splendour just like in a poem. The world in Where Is My Friend’s Home? is adversarial and needs the submission of kids. There is a whole lack of conversation between the children and older generations. Adults totally lack the interest in understanding the kids.
His style of making films out of nowhere, inspires a lot of people to take the move towards making a film. Kiarostami’s script, conversations, and extract output from the non-professional actors comply with the same approach. In poems, certain rhyming and repetitive consequences are used, which might also not be the natural form of expression, but it achieves an elegant beauty. The Iranian director too uses abstract and repeated dialogues in order to reconstruct the boundaries of art cinema.
Similar to the artwork of painting or poetry, there are no concrete messages in his movies; the eye of art-seekers can construct specific meanings. This art of using film-form, as more than a skill of telling stories, is what certainly elevates Kiarostami amidst the group of exceptional filmmakers. From his 1970 short movie “Bread and Alley” to the final movie “Like Someone in Love” (2012), each and every Kiarostami film is like re-reading a soul-soothing poem: the feelings it provokes inside you changes each and every time as per your mood.
