The Wind Will Carry Us - 1999
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
A film crew travels to a remote Iranian village in order to document the unique burial rituals carried out for an old dying woman.
Color, 1 hour 58 minutes, Farsi
Original Title: Baad Ma Ra Khahad Bord…
Watch Trailer (Farsi w/English subtitles), Watch Scene (Farsi w/English subtitles)
Star Rating

Firouzan Rank # 17
Cast
Behzad Durani | |
Farzad Sohrabi | |
Shapour Ghobadi | |
Massoud Mansouri | |
Masumeh Salisi | |
Bahman Ghobadi |
Crew
Writer | Abbas Kiarostami |
Director | Abbas Kiarostami |
Producer | Marin Karmitz Abbas Kiarostami |
Director of Photography | Mahmoud Kalari |
Sound Recordist | Jahanghir Mirshekari Afshin Nazem |
Editor | Abbas Kiarostami |
Sound Mixer | Mohammad Reza Delpaak |
Music | Peiyman Yazdanian |
Pictures

A Kiarostami Introduction - the audience meets the film crew through dialogue and long shots of the winding roads that they travel.

The remote village would look familiar to anyone previously exposed to Kiarostami's work.

The director must scramble for higher ground and better reception every time that his cell phone rings.

The director befriends an off screen grave-digger who literally "throws him a bone."

Walking with the local child who acts as the group's guide.

Shaving towards the audience.

The guide is not averse to getting a little help on his exams.

The director gives a poetry lesson to the milking girl.

A quick window wash before leaving.

The bone makes its way down the river.
DVD

External Reviews
By Jeffrey M. Anderson Combustible Celluloid
Abbas Kiarostami's films have a knack for taking us away to a clearer, more vivid place, allowing us to breathe for what seems like the first time in years. He has done that once again, and better than ever before, with his newest film, "The Wind Will Carry Us." It joins his list of recent unalloyed masterpieces: "Close-Up" (1990), "And Life Goes On..." (1991), "Through the Olive Trees" (1994), "Taste of Cherry" (1998), and his screenplay for Jafar Panahi's "The White Balloon" (1995).
All of Kiarostami's films are about some kind of journey, or search, or yearning. That's the key to Kiarostami's success, I think, as who in the world cannot identify with such basic themes? "The Wind Will Carry Us" is yet more sophisticated because it deals with a yearning but not a journey. The journey is over by the beginning of the film as a filmmaker (also called an "engineer") named Behzad and his crew make their way to a remote village in Iran. We learn, slowly over the course of the film, that they are waiting for a 100-year-old woman to die so that they can document her funeral ceremony. But the old lady keeps hanging on and Behzad comes to know the little town while he waits. Continued
By A.O. Scott The New York Times
Near the end of "Taste of Cherry," the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's lavishly acclaimed 1997 film, an elderly taxidermist delivers a wise and rueful soliloquy on the value of life, a sympathetic critique of the main character's suicidal despair.
"The Wind Will Carry Us," Mr. Kiarostami's new movie, which opens today at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, ends on a similar note. A grizzled old doctor lectures the protagonist, a saturnine engineer a long way from home, about the glory of creation and the human obligation to notice it. Continued

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