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Where Is the Friend’s House?.We’d like to know you better, dear reader! Please take a moment to complete our first-ever survey, practically ensuring that you will soon find even more of the kind of thing you like in our pages.As further enticement, we will enter all survey respondents into a raffle to win a yearlong subscription to Notebook magazine—great film writing you can enjoy even when your phone dies!

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network, our array of film and TV chats are Christmas themed appropriately talking a brace of John McClane, festive Muppets and more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

At the Movies in the 90s

Welcome to the (Christmas) party, pal! A. J. Black and new guest Mark McManus get into all things Die Hard 2 for this festive episode, which comes with an important announcement to boot…

Britcom Goes to the Movies

In the festive finale of the podcast’s third season, hosts Rob Heath and Guy Walker, with guest comedian Rob Gilroy, tackle 2014’s Christmas family comedy Get Santa…

CineMortuary

Wherever you find podcasts, it feels like Christmas! To bedlam with the premise of the show, instead Rob Yeomans, Dave Walker and Chris Wilson throw off the ghostly shackles of horror and enjoy the best Christmas film of all time...

When we discuss a filmmaker’s work, we mostly tend to focus on their full-length features. Often, we overlook important works such as documentaries, short films, and even the commercials. To fully appreciate their artistry, we should consider these other forms of storytelling as vital as the full-length features. Abbas Kiarostami is regarded as one of the greatest Iranian filmmakers. He is celebrated for films like “Close-Up,” “Where Is the Friend’s House?,” “Taste of Cherry,” “Shirin,” and “24 Frames.” However, he created many short films throughout his career such as “The Bread and the Alley,” “Two Solutions to One Problem,” “Solution One,” “Recess,” and “The Chorus” that reflect his mastery of artistry and portray a broader picture of his cinematic journey. These films capture contemporary Iran from a unique insider’s perspective, mirroring the societal zeitgeist on a deeper level.

Check also this article 25 Great Contemporary Iranian Movies

As a...

Kids watch some terrible movies. I should know, I have two of them. A24, the independent film and TV studio that has become synonymous with quality, is out to change that.

On September 4, A24 published the 288-page “Hey Kids, Watch This!,” a collection of more than 100 movie recommendations for families. None of them, by the way, are A24 films. The curation was performed by a group of “discerning critics, animators, and directors,” according to a press release. IndieWire’s own chief film critic and reviews editor David Ehrlich contributed a primer on how to talk about movies with your kids.

“Hey Kids, Watch This!” covers both hits and deep cuts. How deep? Has your preschooler seen Yuri Norstein’s 10-minute short film from 1975, “Hedgehog in the Fog”? Right, mine neither. Are the ’70s not ancient enough for your young-Old-Hollywood head? How about the 100-year-old film “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” from German director Lotte Reiniger?...

Standing tall as one of the most well-decorated filmmakers of recent times and the director of the highest-grossing movie ever by a female director, Greta Gerwig put her best foot forward with Barbie. The mega-movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, as its leads, rode on the creative vision of the 40-year-old as it brought to life Mattel’s doll in a story that revolved around breaking stereotypes and the boundaries between fictional and real universes.

Greta Gerwig at the No Strings Attached Premiere | Credit: Gordon Vasquez for Flickr and via Wikimedia Commons

On her own, the Lady Bird mastermind finds inspiration from a wide base of creatives and finds inspiration from their works of art. However, one particularly poignant piece of work from the late ‘80s has her heart, and she believes will steal anyone else’s as well if given enough attention. The emotional aspect of that flick,...

Newsflash: Iran has invaded the sleepy Canadian city of Winnipeg. Correction: Iranian cinema has actually invaded Winnipeg. Precision: Two Iranian movies that launched the nation onto the international film scene, Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) and Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (1995), have somehow found their way into the capital of Manitoba.

What exactly they’re doing there is never explained. Nor is it really the point of director Matthew Rankin’s bizarre and enchanting experimental comedy Universal Language, which picked up the first-ever audience award in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. Starring the director himself alongside a cast of Farsi-speaking locals both young and old, the film is rather hard to describe on paper, but let’s give it a shot.

We’re in snow-covered Winnipeg, which half-resembles the drab, midsized Canadian city, and half looks like a neigborhood somewhere in Tehran — not present-day Tehran, but Tehran circa the 1980s and 90s.

Image: Carnivalesque Films As any cinephile well knows, the physical places that serve as meaningful ports of entry to our love affair with cinema can often take on swollen, totemic value. It’s fitting, then, that one of the most legendary independent American video stores of all time gets its...

On the 4th of July 2016 Iranian filmmaker, producer, author and poet Abbas Kiarostami died in Paris. While he did not receive the same kind of recognition in his home country Iran as he did in the rest of world, his body of work is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful in the history of cinema. Numerous authors have interpreted the various layers of meaning within his features, but perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of his works is the way he uses landscape. While many directors uses landscape, rural or urban, as the background for the story or the characters, Kiarostami has continued to explore means to use landscape as a means to not just tell a story, but to enhance it, which he perfected throughout his career. In the following, we will take a look at a few examples within his wide filmography emphasizing this very point.

1. Where is the Friend's Home?...

Creative studio and production company Even/Odd has partnered with the Kiarostami Foundation on a special product collection that celebrates the legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The collection currently features three items: a 40-page graphic novel and activity book that reimagines Kairostami’s 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s House?, a small-batch mulberry jam inspired by his 1997 film Taste of Cherry and reprints of original posters designed by the filmmaker for Friend’s House, Certified Copy (2010) and A Wedding Suit (1976). These products are the first of many that the California-based company (founded by Mohammad Gorjestani, a 25 New Faces of […]

The post Even/Odd Partners with the Kiarostami Foundation on an Ongoing Product Collection first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Creative studio and production company Even/Odd has partnered with the Kiarostami Foundation on a special product collection that celebrates the legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The collection currently features three items: a 40-page graphic novel and activity book that reimagines Kairostami’s 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s House?, a small-batch mulberry jam inspired by his 1997 film Taste of Cherry and reprints of original posters designed by the filmmaker for Friend’s House, Certified Copy (2010) and A Wedding Suit (1976). These products are the first of many that the California-based company (founded by Mohammad Gorjestani, a 25 New Faces of […]

The post Even/Odd Partners with the Kiarostami Foundation on an Ongoing Product Collection first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

When Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami received the script for “Where is a Friend’s House?” in 1986, he had already made a number of features for Iran’s Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, which he headed at the time. The majority of these works consisted of didactic tales preaching simple truths about life, school and the state, whereas this new story showed some potential to go beyond. Eventually, “Where is the Friend’s House?” was Kiarostami’s first movie to receive acclaim internationally and started what is now known as the “Koker”-trilogy, a series of films set in the Iranian village of Koker, around two hundred wiles away from the nation’s capital.

Koker and the surrounding villages are also the home to Ahmad (Babak Ahmadpour) and his classmate Mohamad (Ahmad Ahmadpur), who both attend elementary school. One day, after the form teacher scolded...

Ramin Bahrani, Oscar-nominated writer/director of The White Tiger, discusses a few of his favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The White Tiger (2021)

Man Push Cart (2005)

Chop Shop (2007)

99 Homes (2015)

The Boys From Fengkuei (1983)

The Time To Live And The Time To Die (1985)

The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1976)

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

La Terra Trema (1948)

Umberto D (1952)

Where Is The Friend’s Home? (1987)

Nomadland (2020)

The Runner (1984)

Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989)

A Moment Of Innocence a.k.a. Bread And Flower Pot (1996)

The House Is Black (1963)

The Conversation (1974)

Mean Streets (1973)

Nashville (1975)

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972)

The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Paris, Texas (1984)

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Vagabond (1985)

Luzzu (2021)

Bait (2019)

Sweet Sixteen (2002)

Abigail’s Party (1977)

Meantime (1983)

Fish Tank (2009)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Malcolm X (1992)

Nothing But A Man (1964)

Goodbye Solo (2008)

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973)

Dekalog (1989)

The Double Life Of Veronique...

By most accounts, the story behind “The White Tiger” has been festering for almost 15 years. The Netflix project is based on Aravand Adiga’s award-winning 2008 novel that tracks the rags-to-riches saga of a young chauffeur who follows a criminal path to success in modern-day India. The roots of the project, however, stretch back to a Columbia University dorm room and a DVD of “Mean Streets.”

That was where aspiring filmmaker Ramin Bahrani met Adiga in 1993 through a group of largely Middle Eastern friends on campus. “We were all reading things like Dostoyevsky and Camus,” said Adiga, who was an English lit major raised in India. “One day, Ramin came up to the group in the library and said there was a film we ought to see that was as good as the books we were reading.”

Back in his room, Bahrani started the DVD player and made an impromptu case...

By Kirti Raj Singh

After the fall of the Shah regime, the Iranian cinema went through a hazardous state and came out with beautiful films…, Films which were not only praised in Iran, but throughout the globe. So what actually changed in films?

Iran was going through changes; nothing was unaffected by the revolt that broke out in 1978-79. Revolution resulted in the rise of the Islamic republic under Imam Khomeini, after the fall of the Shah Regime, which was absolute monarchy. Iran’s rapidly modernizing capitalist economy was replaced by populist & Islamic economic & cultural policies. Much of the industry was nationalized, laws & schools islamicized, and western influences got banned in every possible way. And then there was Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1980, which, ironically, strengthened the revolution and fed Iranians the determination to carry the revolution outside Iran’s borders.

By 1982, Khomeini and his supporters had crushed their rivals...

Between 1987 and 1994, the late venerated Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami released three films that would serve not only as personal commentaries on life in his home territory of Koker, but also as examinations of how an artist’s ongoing work can and does relate to the work produced prior. The resulting series, which has come to be known as The Koker Trilogy, has been made available by the Criterion Collection in a breathtaking Blu-ray box set. Where is the Friend’s House? (1987) Kiarostami’s village of Koker circa 1987 is a fully tactile place. Rife with dusty, muted colors, mainly beiges and tans with hits of deep greens and dark oranges, the place and its people wear their earthiness with humility and emote the fortitude of generations. Provincial yes,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...