The Wind Will Carry Us

Snapshot

The Wind Will Carry Us (Persian: Bād mā rā khāhad bord) is Abbas Kiarostami's last feature shot entirely on 35mm celluloid before his turn to digital video, and one of the most rigorous distillations of his late aesthetic. A media man from Tehran — identified only as "the Engineer," Behzad — arrives with a small unseen crew in the remote Kurdish village of Siah Dareh under a cover story about buried treasure. Their true errand is ghoulish: they are waiting for a very old woman to die so they can film the region's extravagant mourning rituals. What begins as a comedy of the urban outsider's incomprehension deepens into a meditation on death, patience, and the ethics of looking. The film premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Grand Special Jury Prize (the festival's Silver Lion), consolidating Kiarostami's standing — two years after the Palme d'Or for Taste of Cherry — as the most internationally garlanded Iranian filmmaker of his generation. Its title is borrowed from a poem by Forough Farrokhzad, and poetry, both spoken and structural, saturates the work.

Industry & production

The film was produced as an Iran–France co-production, a model that had become central to the international circulation of Iranian art cinema in the 1990s. The French partner was Marin Karmitz's MK2, Kiarostami's principal Western producer and distributor during this period; Kiarostami himself was the creative and organizing force on the Iranian side. This arrangement is characteristic of how directors such as Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi reached festival and arthouse audiences abroad while working within, and around, the constraints of the post-revolutionary Iranian film industry and its state oversight through bodies like the Farabi Cinema Foundation.

Production centered on the actual village of Siah Dareh in Iranian Kurdistan, and the film's texture is inseparable from that location: the terraced, ochre hillside houses, the winding paths, the wheat fields and cemetery on the ridge. As was Kiarostami's practice, the cast was drawn almost entirely from non-professionals — villagers essentially playing versions of themselves — with the significant exception of the lead. Behzad is played by Behzad Dorani, and Kiarostami built the shoot around directing untrained performers within their own environment, a method that blurs documentary and fiction. Precise budget and box-office figures are not part of the reliably established public record and are omitted here rather than guessed.

Technology

The Wind Will Carry Us was made on photochemical film, and its status as a late 35mm work matters historically: within two or three years Kiarostami would move decisively to lightweight digital video (ABC Africa, 2001; Ten, 2002), a shift he framed as liberating the camera from the crew. This film sits on the near side of that divide, retaining the composed widescreen-inflected landscape shots of his celluloid period while already anticipating the reduced apparatus to come.

The film is unusually alert to communication technology as subject as well as tool. A running motif has Behzad repeatedly jumping into his Land Rover and racing up to the hilltop cemetery every time his mobile phone rings, because the village below has no reception. The mobile phone — a novelty in a remote 1990s Iranian village — becomes the engine of the film's comedy and its central spatial idea: the tension between connected modern life and a place that operates on older rhythms. That the reception spot is a graveyard, where a man is forever digging an unseen ditch, folds the film's technological motif directly into its preoccupation with death.

Technique

Cinematography

The photography is credited to Mahmoud Kalari, one of Iran's leading cinematographers. The visual strategy is built on extreme long shots and a patient, often static or slowly reframing camera that holds Behzad as a small figure moving through a vast, sculptural landscape. Zigzagging paths, dry hills, and the honey-colored architecture of the village recur as compositional motifs — the winding road being a signature Kiarostami form carried over from earlier work. The distance of the camera is not merely pictorial; it enforces the film's ethical stance, keeping the human drama embedded in, and dwarfed by, its setting, and refusing the close-up intimacy that would let the viewer possess these lives too easily.

Editing

Kiarostami edited the film himself, as he characteristically did. The cutting is spare and durational, favoring long takes that let actions play out in real or near-real time — a drive up the hill, a conversation conducted through a doorway, the slow business of daily village life. The most radical editing decision is one of omission: entire characters and events are kept off the visual track, so the "cuts" the audience feels most are the ones the film declines to show. This withholding — the refusal to cut to the reverse shot, to the dying woman, to the man in the well — is the film's dominant formal signature.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The staging is organized around off-screen space to an almost programmatic degree. A remarkable roster of characters is heard but never (or barely) seen: the dying old woman whose expiry the crew awaits; Behzad's own colleagues, whose voices drift from a house he keeps entering; Youssef, the man digging in the deep telecommunications ditch on the hill; and, in a celebrated sequence, a young woman milking a cow in a dark cellar to whom Behzad recites Farrokhzad's poetry while we see almost nothing of her. This systematic use of the unseen makes absence the film's primary staging tool — presence is implied, deferred, kept just outside the frame.

Sound

With so much held off-screen, the soundtrack carries an enormous share of the storytelling. Disembodied voices, the wind, birdsong, animals, and the ambient life of the village construct a world larger than what is visible; sound continually gestures toward the space the image withholds. The film essentially forgoes a conventional non-diegetic score, in keeping with Kiarostami's austere late manner, so that the "music" of the film is environmental — the wind of the title made audible. (Specific sound-department credits should be verified against the film's titles rather than asserted from memory here.)

Performance

The performances operate on the seam between acting and being. The villagers deliver a naturalism that comes from playing within their own lives, while Behzad Dorani, as the Engineer, must sustain a more constructed characterization: worldly, impatient, faintly contemptuous, gradually unsettled. Kiarostami's well-documented method — feeding lines, shooting reactions separately, drawing behavior rather than "performance" from non-actors — produces the film's distinctive tonal mixture of documentary immediacy and controlled irony.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's dramatic mode is deliberately anti-dramatic: it is a study in waiting. The ostensible plot — will the old woman die, will the crew get their footage — is repeatedly deferred, and the "event" the whole enterprise depends on is precisely what the film refuses to deliver as spectacle. In its place, Kiarostami substitutes a chain of small, often comic encounters and repeated actions (the phone, the drive, the ditch-digger). This is elliptical, open-ended storytelling in which meaning accretes through repetition and withholding rather than causal escalation. The narration is oblique to the point of teasing: the audience, like Behzad, is kept partly in the dark about who exactly he is, what his crew wants, and how long they must all wait — a structure that implicates the viewer in the same impatient curiosity that makes Behzad's project morally suspect.

Genre & cycle

Nominally a drama, the film resists genre almost entirely, sitting instead within the international art-cinema tradition of the contemplative, slow-paced character study. It belongs to a specific cycle in Kiarostami's own filmography: the loose sequence of works about a man driving into rural terrain on an ambiguous mission, of which Taste of Cherry (1997) is the immediate predecessor, and which reaches back to the Koker films (Where Is the Friend's Home?, And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees). Within the broader landscape of 1990s "festival cinema," it stands as an exemplar of the meditative, reflexive art film — the mode later theorized under rubrics such as "slow cinema."

Authorship & method

The Wind Will Carry Us is a near-total authorial statement by Abbas Kiarostami, who directed, wrote the screenplay, and edited. His method is unmistakable throughout: non-professional casting, location shooting in a real community, the recurring image of the winding road, the philosophical use of the automobile as a mobile interview space, and a self-reflexive concern with looking, recording, and representation — here sharpened into an implicit critique of the documentarian/outsider (a figure not far from the filmmaker himself). The screenplay is Kiarostami's; sources sometimes cite an originating story idea by a collaborator, but this attribution should be checked against the credits rather than stated with false confidence.

His key collaborator on the image was cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari, whose long-lensed landscape work is fundamental to the film's meaning. On music, the film is best described as essentially scoreless in the conventional sense — a deliberate authorial choice consistent with Kiarostami's late aesthetic — and any specific composer credit should be confirmed from the titles rather than assumed. The literary "co-author" of the film is arguably the poet Forough Farrokhzad, whose poem supplies the title and one of the film's central spoken passages; Omar Khayyam's verse is also invoked, chiefly through the doctor character. Kiarostami's lifelong identity as a poet and photographer in his own right stands behind this literariness.

Movement / national cinema

The film is a landmark of the Iranian New Wave in its post-revolutionary, internationally celebrated phase. Alongside the work of Makhmalbaf, Panahi, Majidi, and others, Kiarostami's cinema defined the global image of Iranian film in the 1990s: humanist, formally austere, rooted in rural and everyday life, and adept at turning restrictive production conditions into an aesthetic of suggestion and ellipsis. Kiarostami was the movement's most influential figure, and this film represents its reflexive, philosophical wing — less concerned with children or neorealist social observation (though it touches both) than with perception, mortality, and the act of representation itself. Its Kurdish setting also situates it within Iran's internal cultural diversity, though the film is observed from the outsider's, Tehrani, vantage.

Era / period

Made at the very end of the 1990s, the film is a product of a comparatively open interval in Iranian cultural life associated with the reformist presidency of the period, when Iranian cinema enjoyed heightened international visibility. It also marks a hinge moment in film history broadly: shot on celluloid on the eve of the digital revolution that Kiarostami himself would soon embrace and help legitimize as an art form. The mobile phone as narrative device likewise stamps the film precisely to its turn-of-the-millennium moment, when such technology was arriving unevenly across the modern and the traditional worlds the film juxtaposes.

Themes

Death and the vigil are the film's gravitational center — not death as event but as anticipated absence, forever deferred and never shown. Around this cluster several concerns: the ethics of watching and recording, embodied in Behzad's exploitative errand, which quietly indicts the media gaze (and, reflexively, cinema itself); the collision between urban modernity and rural tradition, played first for comedy and then for moral weight as the outsider's condescension is gradually chastened; and the relationship between technology and place, connection and reception. Running beneath all of it is a poetic affirmation of ongoing life against the pull of mortality — the wind and the flowing stream of Farrokhzad's imagery, the recurring reminder to attend to the living world. The film's much-discussed closing gesture, in which Behzad tosses a bone into moving water, crystallizes this turn from morbid waiting toward the current of life.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, the film was received as a major work by one of world cinema's most esteemed auteurs, capped by the Grand Special Jury Prize at Venice in 1999. It divided some viewers by the very qualities that define it — its slowness, its withholding, its refusal of conventional payoff — but among critics attuned to Kiarostami's project it has been widely regarded as among his richest and most complex films, and it has retained a strong position in the canon of late-twentieth-century art cinema.

Looking backward, the film's influences are legible: the modernist European art cinema of ambiguity and duration (the lineage of Antonioni and Bresson is often invoked for Kiarostami); the deep tradition of Persian poetry, from the classical Khayyam to the modern Farrokhzad, which shapes both its title and its worldview; the ethical realism of Italian neorealism, filtered through Kiarostami's own earlier films; and the reflexive documentary-fiction hybridity he had been developing since the Koker cycle.

Looking forward, its legacy is substantial. It stands as a key reference point for the international "slow cinema" tendency of the 2000s and after, and its rigorous use of off-screen space and the withheld image has been influential on subsequent contemplative filmmakers. Within Kiarostami's own trajectory it functions as a threshold work, the last celluloid feature before the digital experiments that would extend his inquiry into representation. More broadly, as one of the crowning achievements of the Iranian New Wave at its international peak, it helped secure the global critical prestige of Iranian cinema and the auteur model of Iran–Europe co-production that sustained filmmakers who followed. Kiarostami's death in 2016 prompted extensive reappraisal of his body of work, in which The Wind Will Carry Us is consistently placed among his essential films.