Zendegi va digar hich

Zendegi va digar hich (1992) is an Iranian movie shown in the U.S. with the translated title "And Life Goes On." The film was written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami.

The movie is part of a series of films entitled "The Koker Trilogy." Koker is a small village northwest of Tehran. No one outside Iran would know anything about Koker, except for Kiarostami's films. He used Koker as the setting for the first film in the trilogy--Where is the Friend's House? (1987) (I loved this movie. It has an amazing IMDb rating of 8.1.)

After that movie, people may have vaguely remembered Koker. However, the trilogy has made it famous among Iranians and among cinephiles.

Koker is famous because of a horrible tragedy that took place on June 21, 1990. A devastating earthquake destroyed Koker and many surrounding villages. The loss of life was immense. Almost all the buildings were destroyed.

In real life, director Kiarostami and his son traveled to Koker five days after the earthquake occurred. They wanted to find out if the two brothers who starred in the earlier film had survived the earthquake.

Kiarostami turned his trip into this movie. He found that despite the immense grief felt by the local people, life did, indeed, go on.

Farhad Kheradmand starred as the film director (Kiarostami), and Buba Bayour stared as his son Puya. Neither is a professional actor, but you could never tell that from their performances, which are superb. (Bayour never acted again. Kheradmand appeared again in the third movie of the trilogy--Through the Olive Trees.)

Basically, this movie is a quest movie. The father and his young son are determined to find the young boys, and the immensity of the tragedy continually puts obstacles in their way.

Kiarostami is famous for using panoramic long shots, and this is what we see at the end of the film. The closing long shot is one of the most powerful film endings I've ever seen.

This is an amazing film. It has a very high IMDb rating of 7.9. I rated it 10. It worked well enough on the small screen, but of course it would be better in a theater. We saw it on a Criterion DVD, sold with the other two movies in the the trilogy. The films may be available separately, which would be OK. However, the Criterion edition has many video extras, along with a written essay by noted film critic Godfrey Cheshire.

This a wonderful movie--I would say it's a must-see if you love great cinema. Find it and watch it.

IMPORTANT: The trilogy should be seen in order of production: Where is the Friend's House?, then And Life Goes On, then Through the Olive Trees. The movies won't work as well if seen out of their order.

Life and Nothing More (1992, dir. Abbas Kiarostami) What is so unusual about Kiarostami's films? They seem to to inhabit a world that is so ordinary, mundane even, and yet they are lent a sense of wonder as well. The simplicity of action and story is undermined by circumstances that reveal the courage that it takes just in order to live. Here a man and his son are driving to Koker, a town which has been devastated by the Iranian earthquake. Along the way they come across people who are carrying their belongings, food supplies, heaters, etc. after having lost everything. They stop to ask for directions. One woman can't help them, breaks out in tears, "I've lost 16 people" The man can only say, "May god grant you forbearance." There is no easy sentimentalism. Here life goes on for those that survive in spite of it all. There is still the need to fill ones life with love and joy and momentary pleasure. One man talks of his plan to get married in his hometown, despite the disaster. The son talks to his friend about watching a soccer game. He becomes terrifically excited by the building of an antenna at one of the nearby villages which will allow him to watch the game. You see none of the horrific footage of mangled bodies and uncontrollably hysterical victims that we usually associate with natural disasters. You only see people who have experienced tragedy, but continue to live and endure.

If I hadn't read a review or two this movie before watching, i would have been convinced this was a documentary. But it's not. It's a piece of fiction which comes across as a documentary. I am thinking of Orson Welles "War of the worlds" "After the 1990 earthquake in Iran that killed over 30,000 people, Kiarostami went to search for the stars of his previous film Where Is the Friend's Home?. This film is a semi-fictional work based on these events, shot in a documentary-style. It shows a director (played by Farhad Kheradmand) on this journey through the country in the aftermath of the earthquake." The movie puzzled me. Is the main actor a professional among amateurs? The acting (and I guess it is acting) doesn't come across as acting. My favourite moment comes in a sequence during which the lead speaks to two young girls doing their laundry in the open. That's because both of their houses have been destroyed due to the disaster. One of the girls seems more timid than the other. For a few moments there is a shy smile on her face. Is that acting? Looking forward to seeing more of this directors work.

This movie has the realistic feel of a documentary although I wouldn't call it a faux documentary because there is no pretension that it is a mock-up. It has the feel of a documentary and if you didn't know any better, you could quite reasonably conclude that it was. I would say that it is in the tradition of the Bicycle Thief or other classics of the Neo- Realist genre in which life proceeds at a leisurely pace and multiple quotidian events and regular people ground the plot as realistically as possible.

In this film, an Iranian director (Farah Kheradmand), representing Kiarostami, travels with his son (Buba Bayour) to small town Koker in the remote mountains of Iran to find a child actor who had been in his most recent movie and about whom he worried in the wake of a strong earthquake. Clearly there is some overlap with real life events as there was a major earthquake in Iran in 1990 and one of the stars of Kiarostami's previous movies ("Where Is The Friend's Home?") lived in this area. The pace of the movie, the everyday transactions, and the humans' doggedness in the face of tragedy indicate Kiarostami's love for people and thoughtfulness as a director.

Throughout the movie, we see slices of life. We see a young couple getting married even on a day when some of their relatives die, explaining that they thought they should continue, particularly on such a sad day. We see a man lugging heavy belongings to help out his family. We see a young Buba, with the wisdom of an old man, heartbreakingly consoling a woman who has lost one of her daughters. We see a little baby crying and the director quickly consoling the baby. One of these incidents in and of itself would be insignificant, but they are linked together in such numbers that the collective weight of the movie stays with you and cannot be shaken. Together, such a collection of events comprise the guts and the essence of life. The humble dignity of the characters will not be forgotten easily.

There is a long intro before the title. A film director and his son are shown driving in a small beat-up car to northern Iran soon after the 1990 earthquake. When the car enters a long tunnel, the camera keeps rolling and on the darken screen the titles finally appear.

The film director is nominally Kiarostami, but played by an actor. Typical for his films, the documentary genre blurs with the fictional account. The devastation that we see from the moving car is real, though the lamentations we witness are probably staged, which does not diminish the sense of suffering of the affected local communities.

The impetus of this travelogue through a torn landscape is to locate at least one of the kids that was his main character in one of his previous films, "Khaneh-je doost kojast?". That quest is the director's central preoccupation, so much so he does not recognize another boy, who he gives a lift to, that had a secondary role in that film. If you see the aforementioned film, you will clearly remember the face.

The quest is made difficult by roads that have been gutted or blocked by rock and earth slides, and by the steep mountainous terrain of his goal, the small town of Koker. As he gets tantalizing close, we root for him.

The way the film ends may be disappointing to some, but I found that it matched the title of the film, "And Life Goes On". For the survivors of the earthquake there is mourning for the dead, but at the same time the 1990 World Soccer Cup is going on. What team will make it to the final? While houses have to be rebuilt, it is also important that TV antennas be lifted so that all can see the games in the evening. The director will make more films but now he is concerned about the well-being of that child actor. So life goes on, the quest must go on. There is no ending.