The Wind Will Carry Us

For true cinephiles, the work of Abbas Kiarostami was the great revelation of the 1990s, and he would probably top international filmmakers’ lists of the most admired and influential director of that that decade. Kiarostami started making films in the 1970s but his career was derailed by the Iranian Revolution. It was only in the late 80s that he was able to make features again, and these started to appear at film festivals: masterpieces like Close Up (1990), And Life Goes On (1992), Through the Olive Trees (1994) and Palme d’Or winner, The Taste of Cherry (1997). The Wind Will Carry Us, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, sits easily with this run of incredible films, movies which sculpt the construction of film artifice down to elemental simplicity.

This subtle, nuanced picture finds Kiarostami refining and honing themes from his earlier work, this time in a bone-dry comic vein reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist abstract dramas. Yet on the surface this too is a realist film, a straightforward (if highly elliptical) account of three Tehranis arrival in a dirt-poor Kurdish village to make a documentary about traditional funeral rites. Only the elderly woman they have come to see buried is hanging on to life. Some measure of how much Kiarostami leaves out may be gauged by the fact that of the three urban sophisticates, we only ever see one, an engineer (apparently), who is another of the director’s alter-egos. For all its mazy formalism, this is also a deeply humane and perfectly simple film about cultural incomprehension. Funny too.

This ambiguous comic masterpiece could be Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest film to date; it’s undoubtedly his richest and most challenging… You have to become friends with this movie before it opens up, but then its bounty is endless.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

It’s part of the movie’s formal brilliance that, suddenly, during its final 10 minutes, too much seems to be happening. The Wind Will Carry Us is a film about nothing and everything — life, death, the quality of light on dusty hills.

J Hoberman, Village Voice

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