What to Watch: The Koker Trilogy, "Send Help"

As mentioned in a post last week, I hosted a screening of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Where is the Friend’s House?” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, 1987, streaming on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy, for rent on Apple TV and Fandango at Home) on Thursday at a local movie theater. It’s a lovely film, one that reminds us that children are innately moral until life and grown-ups convince them otherwise, and the response from the audience was one of intensely warm gratitude for a story that restores faith in humanity at a time when it seems in very short supply. That the movie is Iranian is certainly relevant to this particular moment in time, but Kiarostami’s breakthrough feature has been slowly ascending the ladder of Beloved Cinematic Classics for a few decades now regardless of where it’s from.

At the same time, watching “Where is the Friend’s House?” in 2026 prompts one to wonder where Babak Ahmadpour, the eight-year-old child Samaritan at the film’s center, is today. He’d be around 48 by now: Has he survived Iran's autocratic rule, the depredations of NOPO, the Guidance Control, the Special Units and other instruments of state repression? Did he keep his head down or has he done time in Evin Prison with so many of his countrymen?

We know he survived one disaster, one of the most devastating to ever hit Iran: The 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake, which killed as many as 50,000 people in the country’s northwest. A day after the quake, director Kiarostami and his young son traveled 200 miles from Tehran to Koker, the village where “Where is the Friend’s House?” was filmed, hoping to find Babak and his brother Ahmad (who plays the hero’s unlucky classmate in the film) alive. Out of that trip came a movie, the second in what has come to be called “The Koker Trilogy”: “And Life Goes On” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, 1992, streaming on the Criterion Channel, for rent on Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home).