Where Is The Friend's House? · reception & legacy
1987 · Abbas Kiarostami
How Where Is The Friend's House? has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Barely seen outside Iran on release, it broke through when it won the Bronze Leopard at Locarno in 1989 — the film that effectively introduced Kiarostami, and Iranian cinema's new wave, to the world. Now it's routinely called one of the great films about childhood, full stop.
What's debated
The perennial fan debate: is its radical simplicity — a whole film hung on a kid trying to return a notebook — profound minimalism or (as skeptics grumble) a short stretched to feature length?
Its footprint
The zigzag path up the hillside became one of world cinema's most quoted images — Kiarostami liked it so much he returned to it across the whole Koker trilogy. The title itself is borrowed from a beloved Sohrab Sepehri poem, giving the film a second life in Persian literary culture.
Where it stands
Once a deep cut for festival-goers, it's now a Letterboxd darling and the standard 'start here' answer for Kiarostami — the first panel of the Koker trilogy every completist has to log.