Dramatizing the Simple Subject

Where Is The Friends House Directed By Abbas Kiarostami

The film Where is the Friend’s House by Abbas Kiarostami is a film about goodness and innocence in the face of danger and challenges. Ahmad is a schoolboy who accidentally takes his friend Mohammad’s school book home with him. Mohammad is already in trouble for not doing his work, and if he fails to do it one more time he will be expelled. Ahmad spends all day looking for his friend so that he can give him his book, but he never finds his house so instead he stays up at night doing the work for his friend, and the next day at school he gives Mohammad his book and the work passes the teacher’s inspection. The story is so simple yet so elegantly told that the subject is seen to have great importance not because it is a grand subject of great importance but because it is important to these boys. We see the world through their eyes and for the course of a day we see what it means to be truly giving of self—even if the stakes are probably not as high as they imagine them to be. It is a fantastic dramatization of a simple matter that to children takes on larger than life consequences—and that sense of a thing having larger than life consequences is expertly conveyed through Kiarostami’s use of movement, editing, mise-en-scene, and story.

First of all, the movement of the film is simple and direct: it is almost always focused on the children since this is their world that we are seeing. We are not viewing them as adults from far away but rather we are right there with them, in the classroom, on the street when Ahmad is searching, and in the end when we are back in the classroom. The camera moves to focus the visual narrative always on the children and particularly on their faces. We read so much of what is happening in their faces. Their faces communicate fear, anxiety, and determination. It is beautiful to see so much human empathy captured in so simple a way with such minimal movement.

Second, the director uses many long single takes and still shots to weave scenes together and create sequences that pull the viewer into the narrative. There are not many cuts from one perspective to another. It is rather that the camera is focused in one position for the most part and turned one way or rolled another to capture action as it moves from one area to another. There is not a lot of rapid editing but there is no need for such because the story is immersive and the viewer is meant to experience by being like a fly on the wall of this boy’s life.

Third, the mise-en-scene is often carefully created to give full expression to life in the village as though it were on a stage. Characters pass in and out of frame giving the impression that there is more to this world than what appears in the frame, and that impression makes each scene feel larger and fuller. There is no need for 360 degree panning, as that would actually diminish the effect: by framing a scene with simplicity and allowing characters to move in and out of the frame Kiarostami helps to show that life is all around but at the same time that we should focus our attention on the boy, who is often at the center of the frame.