The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

Sunday, November 03, 2019 @ 3:00 PM
Calgary Central Library, Lecture Hall - 800 3 Street SE, Calgary, AB
FREE Admission

Part of our Library Screening Series, which presents a screening of the film along with a short lecture/guided discussion of its cultural and artistic significance.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) follows journalist Behzad (Behzad Dorani) and a camera crew who have been sent to a remote Kurdish village where they are to wait for the death of a one-hundred-year-old woman so that they can subsequently film a traditional funeral ceremony. Kiarostami began to seriously write and publish poetry later in life, and The Wind Will Carry Us is likely the film in which his Persian poetic sensibility is most foregrounded. At first, the film seems like an almost comic amplification of the tendency toward something close to self-criticism in many of the director’s films, presenting us with another bumbling and often fatuously paternalistic director surrogate, this time in the form of Behzad. If the film begins as a comedy in which Behzad, anxiously killing time, sententiously lectures locals, lies about his profession, preens, and routinely attempts to find locations of sufficient elevation for cellular reception, in its final sections it ascends to a new level of shimmering poetic transport in a scene featuring a young woman milking a cow in a cellar during which the bracingly sensual Forugh Farrokhzad poem from which the film borrows its title is recited. The Wind Will Carry Us ends by reminding us that at the core of Kiarostami’s universe is the idea that life is a zigzag path framed by the ineffable.

Farrokhzad was a poet and filmmaker who died in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Many have called her 1962 film The House is Black a central work in modern Iranian cinema, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum at one point having called it the greatest Iranian film of all time, noting also that it is a work in which “actuality and fiction […] register as coterminous rather than dialectical,” as such presaging the later works of Abbas Kiarostami quite distinctly. Iranian film scholar Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa has said of Persian poetry and the cinema it informs that “the mysteries of the system and the universe are understood and conveyed only through metaphor.” Like its poetry, Persia’s cinema is “compressed, sparse, and metaphoric.”

-Written by Jason Wierzba

MASTERS SERIES: ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

Filmmaker, poet, and photographer Abbas Kiarostami was born in 1940 in the Iranian capital of Tehran. He began making films in the 1970s, in the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, working primarily as a documentarian. From early on, Kiarostami’s films had a special focus on children, with whom he would develop an effective and idiosyncratic manner of working. A turn to narrative fiction films in the 1980s, first with Where is the Friend’s House? (1987), the first film in his newly restored Koker Trilogy, and then Close-Up (1990), a fiction-documentary hybrid, would be the beginning of the director’s remarkable ascent to international prominence. His focus on real people and locations, a product of his documentary background, has earned comparisons to the Italian Neorealist masters of the immediate postwar period, but his work is also suffused with elements adopted from Persian poetry and art. With our Masters: Abbas Kiarostami series, Calgary Cinematheque highlights five universally humanistic works from the filmmaker’s rich cinematic legacy.

About Calgary Cinematheque

We are a non-profit film society dedicated to presenting significant, challenging, and essential works of cinema art in Calgary. During our season, which runs from October to April, we screen films weekly, in curated programs which situate each film in a thematic and historical context. We do this because we believe cinema is an essential form of artistic, social, and political expression. Audiences should be able to engage with a wide range of cinematic expression, not only with what is commercially viable. We believe in the power of sharing these experiences with other people in a theatrical setting and we strive to cultivate a community around that experience.  

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