The Wind Will Carry Us

The Wind Will Carry Us
Directed by	Abbas Kiarostami
Written by	Abbas Kiarostami
Produced by	Abbas Kiarostami
Starring	Behzad Dorani
Cinematography	Mahmoud Kalari
Distributed by	New Yorker Films
Release date	6 September 1999 (Venice Film Festival)
Running time	118 min.
Language	Persian

The Wind Will Carry Us (Bād mā rā khāhad bord) is a 1999 Iranian film by Abbas Kiarostami.The title is a reference to a poem written by the famous modern Iranian woman poet Forough Farrokhzad.In 1999, the movie was nominated for Golden Lion of Venice Film Festival. It won Grand Special Jury Prize (Silver Lion), FIPRESCI Prize and CinemAvvenire award in this festival. It received numerous other nominations and awards as well.

Plot summary

A group of journalists and production engineers arrive in a Kurdish village to document the locals' mourning rituals anticipating the death of an elderly woman, but she remains alive. The main engineer is forced to slow down and appreciate the lifestyle of the village. He who stayed at the village with great enthusiasm for the burial of the old woman finds nothing interesting in the ceremony at the end.

Themes

The Wind Will Carry Us is a poetic interpretation of complex issues such as life and death, modern and traditional and local and global. A traditional village with its old rituals and laid-back life is visited by two strangers whose intentions are mysteriously kept back. A cellphone connects the remote village to an external world which seems to be waiting for the ancient to die. The urbanite visitors interfere into the mundane routines of secluded lives, metaphorically portrayed when the "engineer" enters into a barn to buy milk from a young girl. At times, the local appears to be defenseless and accommodating about the presence of the global, at other, it is clearly disturbed and irritated. The two worlds do not confront each other, however, nor do old and new, rather, these binary oppositions melt in a poetic landscape which shies away from providing answers.

There are several references to the poems of Iranian poets like Omar Khayyám and Forough Farrokhzad in the film which are all about the ideas of life and death.Some symbols of death can be seen during the film (like a bone floating in water in the final scene) which could be regarded as memento mori or more likely carpe diem the idea of enjoying life despite its short length.

External links

• The Wind Will Carry Us is on the Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films list
• Bād mā rā khāhad bord at IMDb
• Lots of reviews on rottentomatoes.com
• Reviews on worldfilm.about.com