Why a film about waiting for a death became a masterpiece of life
In short: In Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 film, a journalist travels to a remote Kurdish village to document a funeral that refuses to happen. As he waits for an elderly woman to pass, he is forced to abandon his urban urgency and engage with the slow, profound rhythms of rural life.
The Wind Will Carry Us follows a filmmaker from Tehran who arrives in the village of Siah Darreh under the guise of an engineer. His true mission is to capture the funeral rites of a 100-year-old woman, yet she remains stubbornly alive. This delay forces the protagonist into a repetitive cycle: he must repeatedly drive to a hilltop cemetery to receive urgent phone calls from his colleagues, who remain unseen throughout the narrative. While the locals are told he is searching for buried treasure, the director finds himself increasingly distracted by the boy who acts as his guide and the quiet beauty of the landscape.
Critics have long hailed the film as a comic masterpiece, noting its formal brilliance and its ability to balance themes of life and death. Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as a challenging work that requires patience, while J. Hoberman observed that the film manages to be about both nothing and everything. The film’s title, borrowed from a poem by the modern Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, underscores its poetic nature. It explores the tension between the desire to document reality and the ethical struggle to capture life without violating its essence, a conflict that mirrors Kiarostami’s own artistic process.
Although it premiered at the 56th Venice International Film Festival in 1999—where it won the Grand Special Jury Prize—the film did not see a United States release until 2000. Its reputation grew steadily over the following decade, eventually earning a place on the British Film Institute’s 2012 list of critics' favorite films and the Arts & Faith Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films. Today, it is widely regarded as a visionary work that anticipated significant shifts in global filmmaking, celebrated for its sublime celebration of the human spirit and its evocative portrayal of light on dusty hills.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: The Wind Will Carry Us
- Also: Wikidata — The Wind Will Carry Us · CC0
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