''And Life Goes On'' ( fa, زندگی و دیگر هیچ ''Zendegi va digar hich''; also called ''Life, and Nothing More...'') is a 1992 Iranian film directed by
Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami ( fa, عباس کیارستمی ; 22 June 1940 – 4 July 2016) was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer. An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of ...
. It was screened in the
Un Certain Regard
(, meaning 'a certain glance') is a section of the Cannes Film Festival's official selection. It is run at the Debussy, parallel to the competition for the . This section was introduced in 1978 by Gilles Jacob.
The section presents 20 films w ...
section at the
1992 Cannes Film Festival
The 45th Cannes Film Festival was held from 7 to 18 May 1992. The Palme d'Or went to the '' Den goda viljan'' by Bille August.
The festival opened with ''Basic Instinct'', directed by Paul Verhoeven and closed with ''Far and Away'', directed by R ...
.
It is considered the second film in Kiarostami's
Koker trilogy.
After
the 1990 earthquake in Iran that killed over 30,000 people, Kiarostami went to search for the stars of his previous film ''
Where Is the Friend's Home?''. This film is a semi-fictional work based on these events, shot in a documentary-style. It shows a director (played by Farhad Kheradmand) on this journey through the country in the aftermath of the earthquake.
Plot
A film director and his son, Pouya, start a journey towards Koker, where approximately half of ''
Where Is the Friend's Home?'' took place, seeking out information on the star of the picture. During the first half, they search for a highway to the village, as most of the roads have been damaged or blocked by
the earthquake; meanwhile, the two cross paths with several locals (who were also witnesses of the earthquake) and often ask directions.
After changing his route several times, the two finally reach one of the villages in which the movie was filmed. They visit one of those who acted, and accompany him for a little while. The director and his son visit the destroyed village and hear additional stories of those who survived, among them a young married couple that lost many relatives in the disaster but
decided to marry anyway (since the dead did not foresee their demise). One scene featuring this couple is a focal point of the third film in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, ''
Through the Olive Trees
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
''.
Later, the director and his son find another child who acted in the movie and take him to the tents, where people from Poshypa (the neighbouring village to Koker) are living, as their houses have been destroyed. The people have a good television and are gathering to watch an important soccer match. The son of the director wants to watch the final match of the Football World Cup with the other kids, so his father leaves him there with the intention of returning later to pick him up. He talks to other witnesses of the earthquake and admires the spirit they have had to move on with their lives.
He passes a man carrying a tank and drives up a large hill until the engine begins overheating and he is unable to continue. He gets out of the vehicle and looks up and sees two boys far up ahead (presumably one of whom is the lead). The man with the tank helps him restart the engine. The director seemingly leaves as the man with the tank goes walking uphill. The director's car races several meters before trying to climb the hill again and after he makes it, the director picks up the man with the tank. Following this scene, the credits roll.
Part in the trilogy
''And Life Goes On'' is the second film of the
Koker trilogy. The first film, ''Where Is the Friend's Home?'', is a fairly straightforward fiction in which the
fourth wall
The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this ''wall'', the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th cen ...
is respected. Following the 1990 Iran earthquake, Kiarostami travelled to the affected area to discover the fates of the child actors who had appeared in ''Where Is the Friend's Home?''. This journey is partly fictionalized in ''And Life Goes On'', which blends fiction with reality. The filming of an episode in this movie is the subject of ''Through the Olive Trees'', which is made in the same style of docufiction as its predecessor in the trilogy.
Each of the films in the Koker trilogy seem to jump to a higher reality where its predecessor is seen as fiction; because of this, the filmmaker himself (Kiarostami) is fictionalized in the second and third film (twice in the latter).
See also
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Docufiction
Docufiction (or docu-fiction) is the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction, this term often meaning narrative film. It is a film genre which attempts to capture reality such as it is (as direct cinema or cinéma vérité) a ...
*
List of docufiction films {{Short description, none
This is a list of docufiction feature-length films ordered chronologically.
Please search for references inside each article:
*1926: '' Moana'' by Robert Flaherty, USA
*1930: '' Maria do Mar'' by Leitão de Barros, Portu ...
References
External links
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{{Abbas Kiarostami
1991 films
Films directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Iranian documentary films
1990s Persian-language films
Films about filmmaking
Documentary films about earthquakes
Films set in Iran