The Wind Will Carry Us

Internationally renowned filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami directors this gorgeous, enigmatic meditation on everyday life. Typical of his work, the film stretches the boundaries of narrative and pacing, challenging the audience to rethink its relation to the film. A quartet of city-dwellers visits a remote village in the northern Kurdistani region of Iran looking for something. The film focuses on one of the four, who is simply called "Engineer" by the villagers. His motives for coming to the village remain opaque throughout the film; although he tells a local boy that he is looking for treasure, he seems morbidly interested in the health of an ailing old woman in the village. In a manner reminiscent of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Kiarostami distances the audience from the characters, both by restricting any interior view of them and by keeping the camera at a distance from the actors; there are only a handful of close-ups in this film. Without characters to understand and sympathize with, the director makes the audience keenly aware of its role as spectators. Instead of the conventional signposts of character and narrative, Kiarostami, through the use of slow pacing and a static camera, allows the audience to witness everyday incidents (procuring goats' milk and tea, picking strawberries, watching a tortoise shuffle by) in a manner that feels at once highly stylized and oddly documentary-like. Embedded in this beautiful yet challenging film is a humanist philosophy that rejoices in life's small wonders. This film won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice International Film Festival and was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival.