Have you seen the house of Mohamed Reza Nematzadeh?

Movie title: Where Is the Friend's House? Original title: Khane-ye doust kodjast? Release year: 1987 Director: Abbas Kiarostami

After I finished watching Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House, I switched off the tv. Opened the book I was reading, read a few pages, and closed it. I wiped our dining-slash-ironing-slash-internat-cafe table. Then started ironing and folding clothes, a chore I have been neglecting for a few days. I ironed all the clothes without feeling bored, without accompanying music with it. I was noticing beauty in a slightly unattended tea cup, I was feeling grateful for my home. I lighted two candles in the living room, just so the room looks like a pleasant view from where I am standing to iron my clothes.

This is my third movie from Kiarostami. While watching Taste of Cherry and The Wind will Carry Us, I was a little impatient. The Iranian mountainside caught my heart, but I was waiting for the story to “complete”. But the movies indeed taught me something—not to look for an ending and enjoy the present. And for my third watch from Kiarostami, I sat down in the couch as a philosophy student—I was not expecting the story to go somewhere, rather I walked with the boy Ahmad from his school, to his village Koker, ran to Poshteh, joined the conversation with random people on random topics, watched the oriental doors and windows with admiration which were made by the village’s wood carpenter.

The movie is about a boy, Ahmad, who comes home after school and finds out that he had brought his friend’s notebook along with his own by mistake. Ahmad has to find his friend’s house and return the notebook, because their teacher would otherwise expel his friend Mohamed Reza Nematzadeh, from the school, for not bringing his homework in a notebook, once again.

Little Ahmad finds an excuse to leave his house, starts running, asking people in his panting voice if they know where is the house of Mohamed Reza Nematzadeh? They don’t know or they don’t care. To the adults ears, the soft, innocent voice of eight years old is almost unheard. Some says to take a left, some says to look for the tree with dried leaves. But there are many lefts, many trees with dried leaves. And to be quite frank, many Nematzadehs also. Ahmad doesn’t give up, he runs as fast as a horse, in the mountain tracks. The eight year’s innocence and the urgency to do good by a friend touched me.

Along Ahmad’s journey, we see the quiet, hill station of Koker. The place reminded me of Kokernag from Kashmir. The trees looked alike, the voices sounded similar. The houses are made of mud, stones and wood. Each household is a single or double storied mud house. The entrance is adorned with a few flower tubs, with green leaves and bright red flowers. In contrast to the beautiful brown mud, the flowers and the leaves makes such a static picturesque scene to stare at. And the entrance door would almost always be blue. The same shade of blue, Persian blue. I have seen these blue doors only in Iranian films and the doors I have seen in Iranian films are always this blue, making me call the color Persian blue.

The camera pane was excellent, single shot rising vertically or horizontally following a character’s path—a lost art from the 90’s era movies. This and the playing of local musical instruments at a scene reminded me of similar unique style used in Satyajit Ray's movie. Both Kiarostami and Ray would choose a remote population for shooting, native instruments for music, child's imagination (watch Agantuk by Ray) and unconventional stories that time and again reminds us that we are humans... Like his Bengali parallel, in Kiarostami's shots, time stands still, frames move with an easy pace, stories turn into philosophical debates.

The wood carpenter accompanied Ahmad to find the house of Mohamed Reza Nematzadeh. The old man was delighted to find a company to speak to, and lectured Ahmad about his legacy—the wooden, designer doors that he made for almost everyone’s household in the village. The conversation about doors were at the same time humorous and thoughtful. Why do you need a better door made of iron when your wooden door served you a lifetime already? Because the iron door can outlive you and can be put in a museum. What’s the use of a door or a museum when you are dead?

The carpenter tries to keep his pace with young Ahmad, and talks almost to himself, “What is so special in the cities, I don’t understand”. Neither do I. But why do we still leave for cities? I felt an ache for that old man, living in the same place for a lifetime, I felt love for the remote mountainous village of Koker, its rough climate, its trees with dried leaves and greeneries that look very different from my tropical flat land green. I felt an ache to be rooted, to mud and leaves and rain and wind…

It was a special movie, I would like to watch it with my kids one day (if I am blessed with ones). I love Iranian directors for making movies around kids, in this PG U/A 13 film era, where films have become tools of propaganda, showing people having a great time smoking, drinking, drugging, affairing while the captions read “smoking kills, drinking kills…”. Iranian films makes me feel human—I cry, I grieve, I realize that pain awakens the humanity in us more than anything. I find my long-gone child-self after I finish a classic Iranian film.

To children, their unheard and innocent speeches and to a quiet living!