Sightlines · reception
How Where Is The Friend's House? was received
1987 · Abbas Kiarostami · Where Is The Friend's House? on Sightlines
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.
Did you know? The village of Koker, where the film was shot with local non-professional kids, was devastated by the 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake — Kiarostami drove back to find out whether his two young leads had survived, and that journey became his next film, And Life Goes On.