After Where Is the Friend’s House?, Kiarostami returned to the same region for And Life Goes On, but under very different circumstances.

In June 1990, northern Iran was struck by the devastating Manjil-Rudbar earthquake. It had a magnitude of around 7.3 to 7.4, destroyed hundreds of villages and left tens of thousands of people dead and hundreds of thousands without homes. The area around Koker, where Kiarostami had filmed Where Is the Friend’s House?, was among the places affected.

The movie follows a filmmaker and his young son driving towards Koker after the earthquake, trying to find out what happened to the two boys who appeared in Where Is the Friend’s House?. But the journey gradually becomes much more about the people they meet along the way than about whether they actually find them.

They drive through destroyed villages, damaged roads and temporary shelters, stopping again and again to listen to people’s stories.

And strangely, the movie never feels completely hopeless.

That is probably what stayed with me most.

The title already says everything: life goes on.

People have lost their homes, relatives and almost everything around them, but they are still fixing things, talking, joking, getting married, watching football and finding some way to continue.

There is one older man who gets into the car and talks about life and age. One thing he says stayed with me, something along the lines of:

I think this movie genuinely made me question how much time I spend worrying about things that are actually very small.
Of course, it is easy to say “be grateful” when life is going well. But here are people surrounded by the remains of their houses and villages, and somehow they are still finding reasons to continue.
The child also gives the movie some of its most strangely innocent moments.
At one point, while talking about a girl who died in the earthquake, he basically concludes that she is lucky because she does not have to do homework anymore.
It is such a childish thing to say in the middle of something so horrible that I almost don’t know whether it is funny or sad.

He also talks about the story of Abraham and his son and somehow comes back to the same idea: maybe people only understand the value of life when they are close to losing it.
And then there is the football.
Among all this destruction, people are still trying to watch the World Cup. The filmmaker stops and talks to a man about whether he is going to watch the game. Later, his son even wants to stay behind with the other children so he can watch the match.

I really love that.

A huge tragedy has happened. Houses are gone. People have died.

And there is still a football match.

There is still homework.

There are still marriages, jokes, arguments, children running around and people trying to get somewhere.

Maybe that is what I take from And Life Goes On more than anything else.

Life does not wait until everything is repaired before starting again.

It just continues somehow.

And watching these people do that made some of my own problems feel a little smaller.