The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami)

Monday 23rd of June, 6:45pm in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema

Join us on Monday the 23rd of June from 6:45pm (film starts at 7pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema for a screening of Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). The film is 2 hours long so the screening will finish around 9pm.

Over the past year or so, we’ve shown a number of Kiarostami’s most important films, from the Koker trilogy (1987-1994) through Close-Up (1990) and Taste of Cherry (1997), to his final narrative films Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012). As a coda, we now show The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), the last film Kiarostami made at his 90s peak of acclaim, before he turned in the 2000s towards making more experimental films, such as Ten (2002), Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) and Shirin (2008).

The film’s title is derived from a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad, the Iranian poet who, before she died aged only 32, made one of the foundational films of the Iranian New Wave, The House is Black (1962). The film concerns an engineer who travels to a remote Kurdish village where he plans to make a documentary but finds himself required to gain a greater understanding of the village and its people.

In a 2000 review for the Chicago Reader, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum – author of a subsequent study of Kiarostami available in the library – called the film “one of Kiarostami’s greatest and in many ways his richest to date”. The BFI’s guide “Where to begin with Abbas Kiarostami” recommends it as “visually magnificent, gently satirical and self-reflexive”.