The Wind Will Carry Us

Kiarostami’s masterpiece about a Tehrani camera crew posing as engineers to film the funeral of a 100-year-old village woman expected to die at any moment, marks a culmination of the filmmaker’s desire for a cinema that encourages the viewer, in his words, “to complete the film.” In a string of sequences that flow and blend into each other, the interactions between the outsiders functioning under certain false pretenses and the locals trying to go about their own lives isn’t a formula for facile conflict, but rather the premise for a profound meditation on existence spanning centuries of culture and human activity. Winner of the 1999 Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion.

“The Wind Will Carry Us offers an intricately constructed spatial world that’s as breathtakingly beautiful, as various, and as cosmically evocative as a Breughel landscape—a world teeming with diverse kinds of life and activity—and it teases us whenever we want to get to know this world better, seducing and evading us at the same time.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader