General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Where Is the Friend's House? (خانه دوست کجاست؟)

Where Is the Friend's House? (Persian: خانه دوست کجاست؟, Khāneh-ye dust kojāst?) is a 1987 Iranian drama film directed and written by Abbas Kiarostami, in which an eight-year-old schoolboy spends an afternoon trying to return a classmate's homework notebook to his home in a neighboring village. It was produced by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon), runs about 83 minutes, and is the first film of Kiarostami's Koker Trilogy.¹^•² It was the first of Kiarostami's films to gain significant attention outside Iran, and it is generally credited with helping begin a new period of international recognition for Iranian cinema.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Abbas Kiarostami; produced by Ali Reza Zarrin for Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults)⁵
Release and length	Iran, 1987; 83 minutes per Criterion and Cinema Iranica (some archives list 85 or 87 minutes)¹^•⁶
Premise	Ahmed accidentally takes his friend Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh's notebook home and searches the neighboring village to return it, since the friend faces expulsion if he again fails to do his homework in it²
Title source	A poem by the Iranian poet and artist Sohrab Sepehri, in which a traveler is told to ask a child "Where is the House of the Friend?"⁴^•⁷
Key crew	Cinematography Farhad Saba; music Aminollah Hossein; editing Kiarostami⁵
Awards	Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival; Golden Leopard nomination; Special Jury Prize at the 5th Fajr Film Festival⁸^•⁹
Standing	Ranked =157 in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll and =72 in the directors' poll of greatest films⁶

Spoilers

Plot

At the village school in Koker, the teacher warns Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh that if he again fails to do his homework in the correct notebook he will be expelled. That evening Ahmed, Nematzadeh's classmate and neighbor in the next village, discovers he has taken the notebook home by mistake. He slips out, telling his mother he is buying bread, and spends the rest of the day searching for his friend's house, asking directions from adults who variously help and mislead him.⁵^•¹⁰ He does not find the house and returns home; the next morning he does his friend's homework in the notebook himself and brings it to school, saving Nematzadeh from punishment.¹¹

The story is told from the child's point of view, and the search doubles as a portrait of rural Iranian society and, in the words of the Criterion synopsis, "a touching parable about the meaning of personal responsibility."¹ Commentators have also read the strict teacher and the boy's choice between obedience to elders and loyalty to a friend as a quiet study of authority and conscience.³^•¹²

Production and style

Kiarostami shot the film in a small mountain town in northern Iran, using nonprofessional actors from the area.⁴^•⁸ The child Ahmed is played by Babak Ahmadpour and his friend by Ahmad Ahmadpour, with Kheda Barech Defai as the teacher, Iran Outari as Ahmed's mother, and Ait Ansari as his father.¹ The Busan festival program notes that the film already contains the style that became emblematic of Kiarostami: nonprofessional actors, a simple and smoothly unfolding story structure, and long-shot camerawork.⁴

The title comes from Sohrab Sepehri's poem "Address" (نشانی), in which a traveler in a strange land is instructed to ask a child where the House of the Friend is; modernist Persian poetry was a lasting inspiration for Kiarostami.⁴^•⁷

The Koker Trilogy

Where Is the Friend's House? is the first film of what critics call the Koker Trilogy (or earthquake trilogy), followed by And Life Goes On (1990) and Through the Olive Trees (1994). All three films depict the village of Koker and its region.¹^•¹³ The link to the second film is direct: days after the deadly 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake, which killed about 40,000 people, Kiarostami traveled to the area ostensibly to find the two young actors of this film, and that search became the subject of And Life Goes On.¹⁴^•¹³ Kiarostami himself did not accept the trilogy label, saying instead that And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees, and Taste of Cherry (1997) form a trilogy about the value of life.¹³

Reception and legacy

The film won the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival and was nominated for the festival's Golden Leopard, and it took the Special Jury Prize at the 5th Fajr Film Festival in Iran.⁸^•⁹ Kiarostami later called it one of the most widely seen films he made.¹⁵ Werner Herzog has named it among his favorite films.¹⁶ In the British Film Institute's 2022 Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, it ranked joint 157th among critics and joint 72nd among directors.⁶

The film's afterlife extends beyond cinema. The single tree on the road at Koker, featured in the film, became a site of pilgrimage, and in 2024 a ceremony was held there in Koker Shamam near Rostamabad, Rudbar, with plans to light the road leading to the tree.¹⁷ The architecture magazine Koocheh has run a recurring design competition named after the film, including a 2021 edition that asked entrants to produce an architectural reading of Sepehri's poem "Address" and a fifth edition in 2025 for a 121-square-meter site in the historic Chaharsuq neighborhood of Yazd.¹⁸^•¹⁹ A 2026 feature film, The Friend's House Is Here, made secretly in Tehran by Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei, is explicitly not a remake of Kiarostami's film, though reviewers note its echo of the earlier film's concern for friends.²⁰^•²¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026