Single Human Quest in Iranian Cinema

[00:00:00]Let's start with the thing that connects all the Iranian films together, if you will. There's one person, one urgent need, and the world they move [music] through while trying to meet it. In Where Is the Friend's House, a boy has accidentally taken his classmate's notebook. If he doesn't return it before the school next morning, his friend will be expelled. And that's it. That's the whole film. Kiarostami doesn't complicate it. He doesn't add subplots or backstories or parallel narrative. He just follows the boy. But watch what happens inside that simplicity. The boy walks through a village, asks adults for help, gets ignored, gets misdirected, gets lost. And in every one of those encounters, you start to see something much larger than a notebook. You see how adults have stopped listening to children. You see how systems, even small ones, if you will, fail the people inside them. You see how much moral seriousness lives inside a child who simply wants to do the right thing. The film is enormous in every single way, but feels small from the outside.

[00:01:06]Another film, Taste of Cherry, does the same thing, but it pushes it further, if you will. A man drives around Tehran trying to find someone willing to help him die.

[00:01:17]And the story consists of just one man, one car, and a request that nobody wants to answer. And that's it. Kiarostami gives you almost nothing else. No explanation on why the man wants to die.

[00:01:30]There is no resolution that tells you whether he does die or not. It's just the driving and the conversations and the weight of the question hanging over [music] every frame. And that weight is almost unbearable. And it's not because what you see, but because of what the simplicity forces you to carry as a viewer.

[00:01:50]Now, here's what I want you to notice as a filmmaker here. Neither of these films require a giant studio or a large crew with multiple units if you will. What they required was a single human pressure so clear and so urgent that every location, every encounter, every piece of silence in the film exists in relation to it. And that is the first principle of Iranian poetic realism and [music] the one I think matters most for us right now. Before you worry about how are you going to shoot your film, figure out your single human quest.

[00:02:24]The one need your story is built around.

[00:02:27]If you can say it in one sentence and feel the weight of it, you have the foundation of the film. And if you cannot, no budget in the world will save you.