For true cinephiles, the work of Abbas Kiarostami was the great revelation of the 1990s, and he would probably top international filmmakers’ lists of the most admired and influential director of that that decade. Kiarostami started making films in the 1970s but his career was derailed by the Iranian Revolution. It was only in the late 80s that he was able to make features again, and these started to appear at film festivals: masterpieces like Close Up (1990), And Life Goes On (1992), Through the Olive Trees (1994) and Palme d’Or winner, The Taste of Cherry (1997). The Wind Will Carry Us, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, sits easily with this run of incredible films, movies which sculpt the construction of film artifice down to elemental simplicity.
This subtle, nuanced picture finds Kiarostami refining and honing themes from his earlier work, this time in a bone-dry comic vein reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist abstract dramas. Yet on the surface this too is a realist film, a straightforward (if highly elliptical) account of three Tehranis arrival in a dirt-poor Kurdish village to make a documentary about traditional funeral rites. Only the elderly woman they have come to see buried is hanging on to life. Some measure of how much Kiarostami leaves out may be gauged by the fact that of the three urban sophisticates, we only ever see one, an engineer (apparently), who is another of the director’s alter-egos. For all its mazy formalism, this is also a deeply humane and perfectly simple film about cultural incomprehension. Funny too.
This ambiguous comic masterpiece could be Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest film to date; it’s undoubtedly his richest and most challenging… You have to become friends with this movie before it opens up, but then its bounty is endless.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
It’s part of the movie’s formal brilliance that, suddenly, during its final 10 minutes, too much seems to be happening. The Wind Will Carry Us is a film about nothing and everything — life, death, the quality of light on dusty hills.
J Hoberman, Village Voice
Media Partner
Abbas Kiarostami
Behzad Dorani, Farzad Sohrabi, Shahpour Ghobadi, Masood Mansouri, Masoameh Salimi
Iran/France
1999
In Persian and Kurdish with English subtitles
Silver Lion (Grand Jury Prize), Venice Film Festival
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Credits
Producer
Marin Karmitz, Abbas Kiarostami
Screenwriter
Abbas Kiarostami
Cinematography
Mahmoud Kalari
Editor
Abbas Kiarostami
Original Music
Peyman Yazdanian
90s, Baby!
Ten years. 11 weeks. 90 films from the 1990s. This summer, 90’s Baby! takes a deep dive into a defining decade of cinema.
Casino
Revisiting the wise guy milieu for the third (but not the final) time, Scorsese tells the story of Ace Rothstein and Nicky Santoro (Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci), two New York hoodlums who become major players in the history of Las Vegas.
Ghost in the Shell
This seminal anime which inspired James Cameron and the Wachowskis, anticipates how AI technology encroaches on the human domain in ways we can scarcely comprehend. "A work of profound and melancholic beauty." Daily Telegraph
La Haine
This angry French thriller about alienated kids (a skinhead, an Arab, and an African) in the working class outskirts of Paris plays like a cross between Do the Right Thing and Mean Streets. French cops turned their backs on the red carpet at Cannes.
Crash
Sex drive, David Cronenberg-style. The car-crash fetishists who orbit Cronenberg's metrosexual Toronto (they include James Spader, Holly Hunter, and Deborah Unger) obsessively seek a fusion of metal and flesh... Fender bender as the ultimate orgasm.
Trainspotting
Danny Boyle's blistering movie was a sensation in 1996: a kick in the teeth of old school British kitchen sink realism, it fearlessly transformed the dire circumstances of Edinburgh heroin addicts into an experience by turns exhilarating and devastating.
Fargo
Have the Coen brothers ever made a more satisfying movie than Fargo? This grisly comedy pits one of cinema's most pure-hearted cops (Frances McDormand's pregnant cop, Marge Gunderson) against the machinations of weak and mercenary men.
Lone Star
John Sayles's modern day Western is a murder mystery which draws sheriff Chris Cooper to investigate two of his predecessors, the notoriously corrupt Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson), and his own father, Buddy (Matthew McConaughey).
90s Mystery Movie + Trivia Night
And now for a shot in the dark... We're not announcing the Mystery Movie in advance, so you'll have to take a leap of faith. We can say it was released between January 1990 and January 2000, and it's not already showing elsewhere in this series. As an added enticement we're going to throw in a 90s movie trivia night with your ticket — plus prizes!
Princess Mononoke
A mystical fight between humans and the Animal Gods of the forest. Ashitaka, the last prince of a dying race, struggles to find a way for both sides to co-exist. But the fighting only becomes more and more bloody and all hope seems to be lost…
Gummo
Harmony Korine was just 24 when he made Gummo. It's become a cult favourite as much for its singularity as anything else: it's a strange, misshapen beast, a slice of beat poetry translated into experimental film.
Jackie Brown
Take half a dozen characters who know they're in a fix, and give them half a million dollars to fight over. Tarantino's crime movie (his best) transcends genre in large part because in Pam Grier and Robert Forster it gives us people we truly care about.
The Big Lebowski
The Coens' whacky, warped slacker generation riff on Raymond Chandler, a shaggy dog story which delights in going sideways at every turn. Jeff Bridges is the Dude, and what he really wants is to get his rug back...