And Life Goes On…

This 1992 masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami uses nonprofessional actors to restage real events. Accompanied by his little boy, a film director from Tehran drives into the mountainous region of northern Iran, recently devastated by an earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people. He searches through various villages for two child actors who appeared in Where Is the Friend’s House?, but what we find is more open-ended and mysterious: the resilience and, in some cases, the surprising optimism of people putting their lives back together, the beautiful landscapes, the alternating and overlapping viewpoints of the director and his son. A picaresque narrative with a profound sense of presence and a philosophical sense of the long shot that occasionally calls to mind Tati, this [is a] haunting look at what does and doesn’t happen to people confronted by natural disaster…. – Jonathan Rosenbaum