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i must have seen a different film!!

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

A true masterpiece. When I watched it in 2015, 28 years after the movie was made, I am ashamed of my time wasted watching Hollywood movies, which had no substance. I watched movies when it was box office hits. This movie showed me what life is, what movie making is all about, how to tell a story. I felt human life to my bare bones. I feel I'm human again. The slow moving pace of the movie , is amazingly engaging, as I was absorbed in the child's journey as if it my own. I wish more parents, teachers and elders would watch it. In this age, we lack empathy, hence we lost touch with our human values. This movie is a masterpiece.

Welcome to backwoods Iran: a place so spare and rudimentary that iron doors are cutting-edge innovation. Like the proverbial fly on the wall, we gain an intimate perspective on three generations of folks in Koker and Poshteh, places in which no one ever really listens to children, adults are overworked and overwrought, and it's never really clear which can howl louder -- the stray dogs or the punishing wind. Despite the grownups' hardscrabble existence and worn-to-almost-nothing attention spans, the most cherished value in this society is the responsible upbringing of children -- epitomized in the wish that kids "get" what's being said to them with three or fewer repetitions. (As a parent of younger children myself, I applaud this focus on the fundamentals!) Such moral lessons seem to have left their mark on Ahmed (Babek Ahmed Poor), an eight-year-old who will stop at nothing to help the sensitive classmate who sits next to him at school, Nematzadeh (Ahmed Ahmed Poor). Both are deeply expressive actors. How incredibly sad that the village in which this movie was made, and its whole cast of characters, perished in the 2000 earthquake that struck Iran, killing an estimated 40,000 people. I don't know the story behind this film, so beautifully scored with traditional music, but I wonder if it was cast with non-actors -- so great is the sense of verisimilitude.Director Abbas Kiarostami has chosen boy actors with incredible faces and stage personae, but the people in the adult roles shine as well. Listening to Ahmed's toothless grandfather discuss his child-care philosophy with an attentive friend is priceless. So is the contrast between his hard-working mother and spiritless father, crouched on the floor with a radio that doesn't seem to work. With Iran and the United States at loggerheads over the past 30 years, a film like this is a reminder that people really aren't that different no matter where you may roam...

Many reviewers emphasized the difference between this movie and Kiarostami's works that followed. For some this movie was superior to all that came after (the latter being, in their opinion, too didactic, or too dry, or too snobbish, or too demonstrative in their artfulness, or all of these). Others praised the movies that followed for their daring openings in the cinematic art, while this film was, in their opinion, too simple, too naive, or maybe too didactic (again) in making its point.Actually there is a didactic dimension in all movies of Kiarostami: he has a point to make and he makes it. In all his works the plot (if any) is just a support for his thoughts on movie art. Each of his movies is a demonstration about what a movie should be. Each of his movies is actually a meta-movie.Is Where Is the Friend's Home simple? Yes, while also very subtle. It operates on multiple levels.The exterior level, a plot of astonishing simplicity: like in the fundamental books of mankind, everything is simple, clear, linear, because truth loves nakedness.Beyond this exterior level you'll discover the universe depicted by Kiarostami. A reviewer has observed that the journey of the boy follows a circular trajectory: he is advancing in his quest just to arrive in the same place, again and again. It's a close space, claustrophobic, while the boy is trying each time to enlarge the space. And I noted this circular trajectory, this close, claustrophobic space in all his movies; and also the temptation of the main character to enlarge the space. The same is in Taste of Cherry, in The Wind Will Carry Us, even in Ten.Another observation made by a reviewer: Ahmed finds the friend's house only to find out that the friend is not there: an unfulfilled journey? Actually the fulfillment is just the journey! The journey has the purpose in itself, even if the personage does not know that. Again, the same in Taste of Cherry, or The Wind Will Carry Us, or Ten.It was noted that no adult could take the boy seriously. I would say, it is more than that. The boy needs to find his friend to give him the notebook: but this is the subject of the movie. Asking the adults to help him is asking the adults to participate in the movie: asking the people from the real world to be also part of the world of the movie. Bringing the real world in the movie! The wish of the artwork to be accepted as reality, to become part of the reality: to make the reality part of the artwork. But this is the crux of Kiarostami's work! And, like in all the other movies, in the end someone understands and participates: the old door maker here, the old taxidermist in Taste of Cherry, the old physician in The Wind Will Carry Us, the woman who shaved her head in Ten.No wonder that this movie was followed by two documentaries (And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees): Kiarostami came back where he had filmed Where Is My Friend's Home, to talk to the people there, to see the effect of the movie upon them, if any, to understand better the universe there, to be accepted, to make that reality artwork.

I believe that the recent movies of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami have been hugely overrated (in the rarefied world of art movie criticism), but this 1987 movie is a genuine gem. A transition between his early didactic shorts and his later full blown (and somewhat pretentious) art movies, this was one of the first Iranian movies to receive some notice in the west, at least in the film festival circuit. It tells a deceptively simple story: a boy has mistakenly taken home another schoolboy's notebook. Fearing the other child will be severely punished at school the following day if he doesn't bring to class the home assignment completed, he decides to go to his house to return the item. The problem is he doesn't known where he exactly lives, so a small odyssey to finds him starts. The boys live in a fascinating mountain village, with very narrow streets, and stone houses. That village was destroyed by an earthquake a few years later, and reportedly the young actors playing the two main characters were killed in it. Kiarostami tells a fictionalized story of a film director searching for the young actors after the earthquake in his 1992's And Life Goes On. Knowing their sad fate makes this film even more moving. And as in many Kiarostami movies, the final scene is a knock out.