The Wind Will Carry Us [15th Anniversary Edition]

Director: Abbas Kiarostami Abbas Kiarostami

Overview

Internationally renowned filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami directors this gorgeous, enigmatic meditation on everyday life. Typical of his work, the film stretches the boundaries of narrative and pacing, challenging the audience to rethink its relation to the film. A quartet of city-dwellers visits a remote village in the northern Kurdistani region of Iran looking for something. The film focuses on one of the four, who is simply called "Engineer" by the villagers. His motives for coming to the village remain opaque throughout the film; although he tells a local boy that he is looking for treasure, he seems morbidly interested in the health of an ailing old woman in the village. In a manner reminiscent of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Kiarostami distances the audience from the characters, both by restricting any interior view of them and by keeping the camera at a distance from the actors; there are only a handful of close-ups in this film. Without characters to understand and sympathize with, the director makes the audience keenly aware of its role as spectators. Instead of the conventional signposts of character and narrative, Kiarostami, through the use of slow pacing and a static camera, allows the audience to witness everyday incidents (procuring goats' milk and tea, picking strawberries, watching a tortoise shuffle by) in a manner that feels at once highly stylized and oddly documentary-like. Embedded in this beautiful yet challenging film is a humanist philosophy that rejoices in life's small wonders. This film won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice International Film Festival and was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival.

Product Details

Release Date:	07/22/2014
UPC:	0741952775591
Original Release:	1999
Rating:	NR
Source:	Cohen Media Group
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Stereo]
Language:	English
Time:	1:58:00

Special Features

Filmed conversation between director Abbas Kiarostami and Richard Peña; Feature-length commentary by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and scholar Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa; New essay by critic Peter Tonguette; 2014 re-release trailer

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Behzad Dourani	Engineer
Noghre Asadi	Actor
Roushan Karam Elmi	Actor
Bahman Ghobadi	Actor,Actor
The Inhabitants of the Siah Dareh village	Actor
Peyman Yazdanian	Composer

Technical Credits

Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami	Director,Producer,Screenwriter
Marin Karmiz	Executive Producer,Producer
Marin Karmitz	Producer,Executive Producer
Jahangir Mirshekari	Sound/Sound Designer
Mohamed Hassan Najm	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

Only a filmmaker as gifted as Abbas Kiarostami could take the familiar fish-out-of-water story and invest it with such fresh ideas. The Wind Will Carry Us is a kind of twin cousin to Bill Forsyth's wry comedy Local Hero, in which a high-tech American professional meets his match in a remote Scottish fishing village. The running joke in Forsyth's film was that Mac (Peter Riegert) had to use a lonely phone booth (which became a tourist attraction when Hero gained a cult following) to communicate with his corporate boss (Burt Lancaster) back in Houston. That's matched here by the Engineer (Behzad Dourani) having to drive to the top of a hill to get his cell phone to work every time he talks with his boss back in Tehran. The Iranian village of Siah Dareh, tucked into the side of a hill, is surrounded by undulating hills of green and gold, and Kiarostami's camera alternates between long shots of the Engineer's travels down one-lane dusty roads and medium shots of his climbing around the almost vertical village. The Engineer's mission, to capture on film a rarely seen ritual that will attend the death of a local woman, is put on hold (just as Mac's attempted purchase of the Scottish village for an oil refinery is put off by an old man who holds out) when the woman stubbornly clings to life. The Engineer is by turns impatient, then fascinated with the simplicity of life in the hinterlands. The villagers are friendly but wary, too, of this stranger; their first instinct is to welcome him, but they do wonder at his motives, as he decides to be discreet and not reveal them. Our view is limited almost entirely to what the Engineer sees and hears, and many of the film's characters remain hidden from our sight, from the Engineer's crew and boss to a mysterious man digging a hole on top of what should be known as Cell Phone Hill to the digger's furtive lover to, of course, the dying woman, whose blue-framed window the Engineer only gazes at from a distance. A local boy named Farzad is the Engineer's one-man welcoming committee and source of information; we are given no more data than the Engineer gets. In its framing devices, which often isolate a figure in a landscape, Wind is also reminiscent of L'Avventura, though Kiarostami doesn't present a bleak portrait of alienation the way Antonioni did. He's curious about the way pockets of his country cling to the old ways, whether they're death rituals or simply ignoring much of what the modern world has to offer in the way of cell phones and convenience stores.