Description of film
Abbas Kiarostami, And Life Goes On (1992) [95 min.]
In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in Iran that left fifty thousand dead, Abbas Kiarostami returns to Koker, the rural northern-Iranian town featured in his earlier film, Where is the Friend’s House (1987). Blending fiction and reality into a playful, poignant road movie, And Life Goes On follows a film director who, along with his son, makes the trek to the region in hopes of finding out if the young boys who acted in Where Is the Friend’s House? are among the survivors. Finding beauty in the bleakest of circumstances, Kiarostami crafts a quietly majestic ode to the best of the human spirit.
Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for this wondrous, slyly self-referential series of films set in the rural northern-Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, the lyrical fables in The Koker Trilogy exemplify both the gentle humanism and the playful sleight of hand that define the director’s sensibility. With each successive film, Kiarostami takes us deeper into the behind-the-scenes “reality” of the film that preceded it, heightening our understanding of the complex network of human relationships that sustain both a movie set and a village. The result is a gradual outward zoom that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life.
Co-sponsored by the Illinois School of Architecture Exhibition Committee and the University of Illinois Student Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in the Department of Landscape Architecture.