The Wind Will Carry Us · reception & legacy

1999 · Abbas Kiarostami

How The Wind Will Carry Us has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Split audiences at Venice 1999 — Kiarostami at his most elliptical, some said his most impenetrable — yet it took the Grand Special Jury Prize, and Jonathan Rosenbaum immediately hailed it as a masterpiece. Today it's settled into the canon as the capstone of Kiarostami's extraordinary 90s run.

What's debated

The eternal Kiarostami fight in its purest form: transcendent meditation on life and death, or two hours of a man waiting around a village — the film cinephiles use to sort the patient from the pretenders.

Its footprint

Its most-quoted image — a man driving uphill to the cemetery every time his cell phone rings, chasing a signal — has only grown funnier and more pointed in the smartphone era. The title itself comes from a poem by Forough Farrokhzad, which is recited in the film.

Where it stands

A fixture of best-of-the-1990s lists and the Iranian New Wave canon — the film you cite to show you've gone deeper into Kiarostami than Close-Up and Taste of Cherry.

★ Did you know? Kiarostami deliberately keeps around a dozen speaking characters entirely off-screen — voices you hear throughout the film but never once see, including most of the protagonist's own crew.

Named by the director

Influences Abbas Kiarostami has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Forough Farrokhzad — Kiarostami took the film's title from her poem 'The Wind Will Carry Us,' which is recited in the film — an explicit homage to the modernist Iranian poet (and director of The House Is Black).