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Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Country: Iran

Runtime: 86 minutes

Color / Mono

In Kiarostami's second documentary feature about education, the filmmaker himself asks the questions, interviewing a succession of invariably cute first- and second-graders about their home situations and the schoolwork they must do there. It emerges that many parents are illiterate. Tellingly, many kids can define punishment (the corporal variety seems common) but not encouragement.

.css-1lejymi{text-transform:uppercase;} .css-1ud9u2t{font-weight:bold;text-transform:uppercase;} Abbas Kiarostami Iran, 1989

Returning to the classroom after First Graders , Abbas Kiarostami interviews schoolboys, and just wait until you hear what tumbles from their mouths. Underneath a simple—and simply devastating—premise, Kiarostami unearths a maelstrom of suffering, indicating something rotten in the state of Iran.

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Homework (1989)

Original title: مشق شب.

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Young male students at a local Iranian school are asked about their feelings on homework.

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Homework . Courtesy of Janus Films.

• Abbas Kiarostami
• Persian with English subtitles

Abbas Kiarostami described his ninth feature not as a film, but rather as a filmed inquiry motivated by the semi-explicable problems that his own children brought home every night from school. In the delightful result, young scholars are questioned on camera by Kiarostami himself; with their backs to the wall, framed in close-up, they face the camera and talk about excessive amounts of homework, the allure of TV cartoons, and the lingering promise of punishment that hovers over any possible youthful temptation. A characteristically playful and philosophical examination of modern methods of education,  Homework  finds Kiarostami at his most curious and compassionate.

As I was watching this film, I was transported back to my school years. We learned how to negotiate for our position through rewards and discipline. The film is about authority and how people express themselves while being watched. A camera is also one of the commanding powers in the picture. I have my doubts that this piece is entirely nonfiction. However, one of the ideas of this film, or of cinema in general, is manipulation. This mirror-like image is captivating. —Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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Tonight’s Homework review – Kiarostami-inspired snapshot of Iran’s wealth gap

Inequality is exposed in a series of interviews with schoolkids in a heartbreaking doc that echoes Abbas Kiarostami’s documentary Homework

A cheeky-faced boy of seven or eight is asked what he would wish for. “A big bike and a balloon that never bursts!” he replies with a huge grin, tickled with his answer. Another boy around the same age, more shabbily dressed and serious looking, is asked what life is about. He chews his bottom lip: “Life is something that is filled with difficulty.” This often heartbreaking, painful documentary from Ashkan Nejati and Mehran Nematollahi has a simple premise: interviewing Iranian schoolkids to camera about their lives, school, homework and hopes for the future.

It’s a sequel of sorts to godfather of modern Iranian cinema Abbas Kiarostami’s 1989 documentary Homework , which put the same questions to children growing up in the shadow of the Iran-Iraq war. The new film features plenty of kids-say-the-funniest-things moments. A boy is asked which countries he’d like to visit? “Europe, America … Neptune!” And there’s some commentary on the Iranian education system. But what lingers is the film’s devastating snapshot of the gap between rich and poor. One of the rich kids, a placid round-faced boy, brags about how well-off his dad is and how many cars they’ve got. The interviewer gently probes him: do you know what wealth is? “Yes, someone who has a lot of cash like my dad.” Do you know what poverty is? “No.”

If he ever watches the film he’ll find out. You can spot the poor kids instantly, and not just from their faded, many-times-washed sweaters and DIY haircuts. It’s their clenched body language and lined-before-their-time serious faces – a reminder that for them there’s no time for silliness or play. The headteacher of these boys explains that in calendar years, they are eight to 10, but maturity wise, more like 17 or 18. Most work afternoons and evenings, selling goods on the street or busking. One boy explains how he burns newspaper and rubs the soot on his face to look dirtier, more pitiable. Another pays his family’s rent and food. “I don’t buy toys. When you need to fill your belly, you don’t buy toys.” It’s not an easy watch, but these kids are invisible enough without the world shutting its eyes.

• Documentary films
• Abbas Kiarostami
• Middle East and north Africa

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1989 ‘مشق شب’ Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Young male students at a local Iranian school are asked about their feelings on homework.

Babak Ahmadpoor Farhang Akhavan Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh Abbas Kiarostami Iraj Safavi

Director Director

Abbas Kiarostami

Producer Producer

Ali Reza Zarrin

Writer Writer

Editors editors.

Abbas Kiarostami Yavar Toorang

Cinematography Cinematography

Farhad Saba Iraj Safavi Ali Asghar Mirzaie

Composer Composer

Mohammadreza Aligholi

Sound Sound

Changiz Sayad Ahmad Asgari

Persian (Farsi)

Releases by Date

01 feb 1989, releases by country.

• Premiere Fajr Film Festival

86 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Laura ★★★★

each of these kids are quick to associate abuse with the word punishment, but when they hear the word encouragement, their eyes are blank. and yet, the ending tells us that encouragement is passed between them. even though in most cases adults are not expressing encouragement or support, they have found it with each other. it doesn’t need to be taught. the act exists without knowing the definition. it’s something that is present underneath so much of kiarostami’s work – a silent trust.

homework proposed a slightly new definition of encouragement: allowing your fear to subside when in the presence of someone that sees you. the strength you gain from just being in the same room as someone that protects and loves you.

Review by Sahba ★★★½

Somebody be the Molaei to my Majid, please.

Review by BrandonHabes ★★★ 2

HOMEWORK is a hurricane of devastation from my man Abbas. This thing is pretty heavy and uncomfortable and explicitly sad. For 86min we listen to interview after interview of children describing the burden of homework, the abuse they face at home and school, and the lack of positive reinforcement that would otherwise buttress their academic confidence. 

Behind their words a deeper story is being told. A story about a problematic national mentality, one that normalizes abuse and grooms a future generation for letdown and punishment. 

The most interesting thing about the doc is how transparent the camera and film crew are in probing the parent-child/teacher-student relationship. The presence of the camera does something to the way these kids respond, almost…

Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★★ 1

Kiarostami is outstanding at matching his movies form to their message. Whether it is the constrained monologues conveying isolation in Taste of Cherry , having people play themselves in Close-Up , there is always something about the approach that enriches the themes.

In Homework, the obvious facet to point to is having children talk about homework in their own words. This film is just Kiarostami asking people about homework (and, at points, wider education), his subjects mostly being children - young children. The real brilliance though is how he frames the interviews.

We have an oppressive, almost classroom like atmosphere. Kiarostami is framed as an inquiring teacher, with a camera operator pointing the lens straight at the students. As a viewer, we…

Review by Zegan ★★★★½

Kiarostami did his Homework very well

Review by PopcornIdeology ★★★★

At this point Kiarostami could film an old man sneezing and I’d call it a groundbreaking testament to minimalist cinema.

Homework is just kids talking about homework. What starts out as an inquisitive search as to why kids don’t do there homework slowly morphs into an investigation of positive and negative reinforcement, the lasting effects of punishment, and I think at it’s core: Iranian culture as a whole. I was caught off guard by how invested I was in the film, and it’s clear as day where Kiarostami got his inspiration for Where is the Friend’s House.  

The one element of the film I’m a bit unsure of is the constant cutaways to the camera man, often using the same…

Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 2

When children feel relaxed, comfortable and a sense of trust in those around them, they tend to tell the unvarnished truth, because they do not feel the need to put on airs or impress, nor do they feel they have anything to gain from it like status, acclaim, wealth, etc. like adults do. But, when children feel a sense of pressure and expectations in the environment around them, their word becomes unreliable out of a sense of sinless self-preservation, especially when they are coming from a home/school environment that is hostile or abusive.

In Homework , the infinitely empathetic Abbas Kiarostami interviews a series of children about their homework, but as is ever so common in the works of Kiarostami, a…

Review by Sally Jane Black 2

A deeply uncomfortable interview-documentary between Kiarostami (decked out in intimidating sunglasses and full movie-making mode) and school children, this film exposes ineffectual methods, troubled home lives, and an undercurrent of militaristic jingoism from the mouths of babes. Reality is, of course, unclear here, but there are moments of horror as what would now be termed child abuse is described over and over again--no matter how staged it is, it's clearly inspired by some actuality. You want to believe these sort of things are a matter of history now, but I doubt it is much, in Iran or in America.

Review by Darren Hughes ★★★★½

The last minute is a damn miracle.

Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★½ 2

Homework is a simple yet powerful documentary about the Iranian education system in the 1980s. It mostly consists of children being interviewed, and they give very frank answers that reveal much about what limits them. When discussing what prevents them from completing homework we learn that many have complicated family situations, or live of poverty, or have illiterate parents. Many also live in fear of punishment, which comes in the form of physical violence. It is made quite clear how strict Iranian society was for these children, who are hit by both parents and teachers. It's quite devastating to hear what some of these children faced. Homework also goes further, with footage early on that shows a strong religious and…

Review by luke? ★★★★½ 2

This is like the exact opposite of "fuck them kids". Not sure what that would be though. Maybe "appreciate them kids"?

Review by 😿Andrew Chrzanowski😿 ★★★★½

☆ "It’s a film about homework." ☆

Ah, the inspiration for Daft Punk's legendary debut album. I always wondered.

No, this is not that. It's better. Mašq-e šab ["Homework"] is Abbas Kiarostami's fantastic documentary from 1989, drawn from his own difficulties helping his son with the titular assignments. So, he did what any good father would: went to his kid's school and interviewed a bunch of boys about it, asking what sorts of issues they faced at school and at home, recorded them all and edited them down into a feature-length film.

This is why I don't have children. Also because I'm a garbage human being.

Made just after his first notable film, Where is the Friend's House? , this nonfiction piece alternates…

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Lying About Homework (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)

“it’s a film about homework.”.

Or so Abbas Kiarostami tells a group of schoolboys who approach him on the street and ask what he’s filming. “Have you done your homework?” Kiarostami asks them, in turn. A resounding “Yes!,” and off they go to school, where the director and his crew will soon join them. When an adult passerby stops to inquire about the film moments later, Kiarostami skirts politely around his own intentions — the theme will emerge only through the process of filming, but it has something to do with a problem he encountered while helping his son with his homework — before offering the man a vague summary of what he knows so far. “You could say it’s a visual study of pupils’ homework assignments.”

Taken at face value, Kiarostami’s description of his feature documentary Homework ( Mashgh-e Shab , 1989) is accurate enough; the bulk of the film entails he and his small crew visiting a poor public school in Tehran and interviewing schoolboys, one after another, about their homework. Calling the film a “visual study,” however, would be selling it short by half. Kiarostami understood better than most that cinema is not a visual but an audiovisual medium, comprised of image and sound; Kiarostami’s cinema, in particular, is as much about what we don’t see as what we do. The interactions described above occur in the opening seconds of the film, and already we’ve seen and heard the children but have only heard the adults. Kiarostami and the passerby remain hidden somewhere beyond the edges of the frame, their conversation perhaps heard from a time and place that doesn’t correspond to what’s shown onscreen. Homework is about children, who we always see, but it’s also about adults, who we only sometimes see.

“Why haven’t you done your homework?”

Kiarostami begins by asking this question, or a question to this effect, to each child seated in front of his camera. The answers they give are often banal (for example, they couldn’t do the homework because some family members came to visit) and sometimes poignant (their parents are illiterate and so weren’t able to help them with it). On this level, the film is a rather straightforward journalistic undertaking about children’s attitudes towards homework and, by extension, schooling and education. But as all documentaries do to some degree, Homework reflects a moment in history — here the latter stages of the Iran-Iraq War, a savage conflict that lasted eight years and killed somewhere in the vicinity of a million people. The young boys who appear in the film don’t yet know a world without it. It’s through their responses to Kiarostami’s simple but persistent questioning, which slowly branches off from the topic of homework, that they reveal the immense cultural, social and political pressures that inflect their lives ­— and that they carry with them every day, like their schoolbags, between home and school.

“What do you want to be?” Kiarostami asks a child, to which the child responds, “A pilot.” Nothing at all unusual except the reason given, which is “To kill Suddam.” When asked what he’d rather be if Suddam Hussein weren’t part of the picture: a doctor, to save lives! Despite that he ought to be too young to understand what it means, another boy claims he’ll hit his future son to discipline him — seven times, to be exact, this being the same number of slaps he receives from his own father when he acts up. In a more light-hearted but no less absurd fashion, many of the boys profess that they enjoy doing homework as much as they enjoy watching cartoons. The children’s grades, abilities and circumstances may vary, but it’s clear they’re all learning; that is, they’re learning what they’re supposed to say. And one lesson they’ve learned already, it quickly emerges, is that they get punished for not doing homework. Almost every child agrees on what this “punishment” means — it’s usually to get beaten by a parent, with a belt, or sometimes by a teacher, with a ruler. (Few of them agree on, let alone understand, what is meant by “praise” or “encouragement”.) It isn’t the children’s attitudes towards homework that speak loudest, so much as their fear of what would happen should they not do it.

“Why are you crying?”

Kiarostami isn’t even able to broach the topic of homework with Majid, the last boy to appear before the camera. The poor kid is an anxious mess from the outset, crying for his best friend to be alongside him for protection, apologising for no reason in particular and, most tellingly, keeping his arm raised throughout much of the ordeal — something a teacher has taught him to do, when seeking permission. Kiarostami isn’t a teacher, but he may as well be one for Majid and the other children. Like a teacher, this man already seems to know whether they’ve done their homework or not. And like a teacher, he has the power to pull them out of class for reasons they don’t understand, and into a room full of strange men and their strange equipment, the significance of which they also don’t understand. All Majid knows is that Kiarostami belongs to the adult world — the same world in which belong the men and women who punish children for not doing homework. Which is why Majid cries, and why the children lie.

Like Frederick Wiseman’s American documentary High School (1968), filmed two decades earlier in a country that would soon become one of Iran’s ideological nemeses, Homework questions not just how schooling works but what schooling is for. Wiseman does this by focusing on the processes of schooling, by observing the teachers as they teach and discipline the students. Kiarostami focuses instead on the effects of schooling, by provoking the students to reveal what they’ve learned or not — all while questioning his own role as a filmmaker, as the one doing the provoking. Like their anxieties about school, these children’s anxieties about being filmed are often visible on their faces even before their interview has started proper. Not content with mere observation, however, Kiarostami also makes visible the immediate source of their anxieties, through sporadic shots of he and his crew that remind us exactly who’s in charge; and most notably, through the abundant insert shots of his cameraman pointing the lens directly into the eye of another camera — Homework ’s single most recurring image — that alternate with talking-head shots of the children throughout the film and function as their collective point of view. Kiarostami may be on the children’s side, but it doesn’t necessarily look that way for the children. This bold and jarring image, staged after the fact and shown again and again, never allows us to forget the imbalance at the film’s centre.

“Are you telling the truth?”

In a late sequence, a teacher leads the entire school through a religious mourning ceremony in the yard, echoing the nationalistic war chants the children are shown performing at the start of their day (“ Three and four and five and six, Saddam’s followers are doomed! ”). Kiarostami’s voice emerges, in a rare voiceover: maintaining the detached tone he adopts throughout the film, he expresses regret that the children aren’t performing the ceremony to an adequate standard — then turns off the sound. Kiarostami will go on to pull off a similar manoeuvre in the celebrated final sequence of his next film, the masterpiece Close-Up (1991). In that sequence, a faulty lapel mic serves as the pretext for obscuring a climactic conversation between two characters. The rationale given for the silence in Homework , however, is supposedly “out of respect.”

We can’t know for certain if Kiarostami is telling the truth or not, neither here nor elsewhere — but if the sound has been turned off out of respect, it would seem to be out of respect for the children only. With the homogenising camouflage of the singing removed, we can now see (and “hear”) that the children can’t recite the lyrics with any enthusiasm, or beat their chests properly in time, because they don’t care about or even understand the words and actions they’re being made to repeat. Some boys look around confused while others stare off into space, perhaps daydreaming about when the school bell might ring; many risk punishment and take the opportunity to play, by mocking the ceremony with a custom dance, or by sneaking out of formation to flick another boy’s ear from behind. As the soundtrack creeps back in, the camera locates Majid’s ever-anxious face at the tail end of the sequence — and he appears to be one of only few sorry-looking kids who are taking the ceremony seriously.

With a simple formal gesture, Kiarostami transforms the sequence into both a celebration of childhood and an indictment of blind adult authority — and confirms through sound and image what’s already been revealed through the children’s words. What the children say in Homework is often heartbreaking, but what they say isn’t the same as what they think and feel. (Even Majid will be given a final opportunity to prove as much, in the film’s beautiful closing moments.) The truth of this discrepancy comes in the shape of a lie; to see it and hear it for what it is, Kiarostami must lie himself.

Mashgh-e Shab ( Homework , 1989 Iran 86 mins)

Prod. Co:  Kanun  Prod:  Ali Reza Zarrin Dir:  Abbas Kiarostami  Phot:  Ali Asghar Mirzai, Farhad Saba, Iraj Safavi Ed: Abbas Kiarostami Snd: Ahmad Asgari, Changiz Sayad

MPAA Rating

Homework (1989), directed by abbas kiarostami.

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articles In Praise Of

Why I love Abbas Kiarostami’s Homework

More than three decades after it was made, this landmark work defies classification – a portrait of young people caught between warring countries, attempting to have a typical childhood.

Nadine Mamoon

T hrough my limited exploration of the Iranian New Wave, I’ve found a genuineness comparable to poetry. I often write my own poems, and I find that these come from the very deepest, strongest eruptions of ‘experience’. Poetry writes differently to prose, in that every word feels like it must fit right where it is, and any change in comma or full stop will ruin the hyperbolic replication of said ‘experience’. To me, poetry is not so much a story with a lesson, but rather a display of what it truly means to feel.

A connection between poetry and Homework feels almost imperative to make, sprouting from Abbas Kiarostami’s own confusion on how the film must exist. What does it portray, and how does it portray it? In the first few minutes of the film, Kiarostami is asked whether Homework would be a fiction film, to which he replies, “I don’t know,” stopping himself from declaring it a documentary. What restricts this declaration?

Kiarostami’s discussion with the children of Shahid Masumi school about their own relationship with homework is stitched together between shots of the camera itself. To me, this acts as a refusal of the viewer’s anticipation for the heartache of these struggling children to exist as just fiction when it isn’t. As he speaks to the children, the conversations highlight their troubling journeys in completing their homework. Their many obstacles include their parent’s illiteracy, a lack of understanding of the task, and cartoons. Through their responses comes a poignant, heartbreaking awareness of their youth. Five and six-year-olds, with minds built to enjoy the simpler, more jovial things in life, have been molded to understand and accept terror, grief, and punishment.

When asked to cite their future jobs, every potential option is given with one consistent reason: “to kill Saddam”. The audience is thoroughly reminded of the historical background Homework takes place in – the Iran-Iraq war. This conflict is one I personally connect with, as my parents lived through it, and witnessed parallel effects from their side in Iraq. They often disclose similar anecdotes – a mere 30 minutes of cartoons, which they still treasure deeply, followed by endless war footage, and consistent condemnation of Iran. From Kiarostami’s home in Iran he is able to connect with those his government perceive as the ‘enemy’, bridging the gap through his artwork and choosing to find a commonality, rather than stepping down and strengthening the divide.

This is where Homework’s power is made evident – it isn’t afraid to indict the backbone of a culture that can be so cruel, leaving us with shards of “culture” built off of false ideologies and broken morals grounded hundreds of years ago. Morals we are too scared to throw away, and that are maintained through – as Kiarostami emphasizes – a failing educative system. It is fear that builds barriers between where we are and trying to move forward, and it is the same fear that controls how children are raised in this tradition – where discipline through punishment and abuse, and force-fed propaganda, are allowed to exist freely.

But breaking down years of these outlooks on the ways we go about life begs the question, what do we do about it? How do we fix something so deeply ingrained in our geography, that it is thought that doing it any other way would be impossible?

Visiting Kiarostami’s film on the childhood experience was like visiting a place I lived in ever so briefly, with a culture ever so similar to mine and that of my parents. Tradition is built on a quite tired construct, an endless rulebook held over your head at all times, and a threat of damaged reputation following behind. Where heritage and honor stand above reason, suffering follows. Cornered by what’s expected of you and what you must be, these prerequisites disregard any flourishing creativity. Kiarostami’s view is endlessly fascinating, and not just fascinating, but real, crossing borders to enter a banquet of unanswered questions, questions most are too afraid to even attempt answering. But to ignore and refuse any questions, would be to throw away any chance of a solution.

Returning to my comparison of Kiarostami’s work to poetry, I found that on a third watch, I was met with a profound realization of what the film really is – one that left me unable to think of much else for the days that followed. Kiarostami, the named director, steps down and allows for the ‘narrative’ to flow unprompted through the words of the children. For Homework is not just a film about the children in Iran, it is made for the children in Iran. And it is made by the children in Iran. This is their very deepest, strongest eruption of ‘experience’, whether they may realize it or not, although I strongly believe that they do. This is their wish for change, and this is their want: to be allowed to love cartoons more than they love homework.

Homework strangles me with feeling. It teeters on the precipice of being too much because the portrayal feels tangible. I’ve seen the word ‘verisimilitude’ used in reference to the Iranian New Wave (take, for example, Kiarostami’s Close-Up). The word is defined as ‘the appearance of being true’, but it feels dishonest to apply it to Kiarostami’s work. Within the Criterion Collection, Homework exists as a special feature alongside The Koker Trilogy, three movies about a village, and the children of that village. The true impact of the documentary lies in this very fact – how it recontextualizes the rest of what we see from Kiarostami’s filmography. It gives us the background and undeniable truth that underlines every film he makes about the childhood experience. Even when his films are ‘fiction’, the very existence of Homework alongside them begs for the redefinition of that word. When Kiarostami creates ‘fiction’, is it ever really that?

In creating Homework, Kiarostami offers a reality more devastatingly, horrifyingly real than any fiction. It is a transcription, verbatim of the punishing reality it mirrors.

Published 11 Oct 2023

Tags: Abbas Kiarostami Iranian Cinema

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Homework | Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami has never been shy of image manipulation in his documentary films. One almost hesitates to call Close Up  a documentary, for instance, because of this manipulation, since no one can truly understand how much has been restaged or “acted” and how much should be taken as truth. Certain dubious scenes in Close Up —namely, Sabzian’s trial—pose more philosophical questions about the entire cinematic exercise than they answer, which is partially why the film is ultimately rewarding. Kiarostami’s post-Revolution preoccupation with the treatment of children in Iran inspired him to make the deeply spiritual Where Is the Friend’s Home?  and the less substantial  A Suit for Wedding  and First Graders , all of which examine the environments in which children face everyday abuse. But none are as devastating as Homework . In this documentary investigation, Kiarostami examines the burden of homework, a problem mostly obscured by its private nature. For most viewers, the idea of doing schoolwork at home is an innocuous if not annoying task. But in Iranian society in the 1980s, Kiarostami argues, homework is much more than a chore: It is a whipping post that provides parents and teachers with a convenient excuse to mistreat children. Homework is the yoke that ties kids’ public existence in school to their private lives at home, and it reveals much more about parent-child and teacher-student relationships than a child’s cognitive abilities in spelling or equations.

To conduct his research, Kiarostami kept things simple and picked one school of young males. Kiarostami says he surveyed 800 students, parents and teachers, in order to unearth the difficulties children experience in completing their assignments. The project is a personal one; its predecessor can be found in its fiction equivalent, First Graders . Kiarostami was given the tremendous responsibility of taking care of his two sons after separating from his wife, and he experienced difficulty helping them with their assignments. He was curious if this problem was unique, and within minutes of watching the film it becomes fairly obvious that the director is not alone—many parents struggle to assist their kids with their homework, and for very diverse reasons.

What emerges from this hour-long doc, consisting mostly of interviews with kids, is that the role of Iranian children is one of a scapegoat for any and all household problems. Homework  is not as manipulated as Close Up ; its structure is too simple, its purpose too straightforward. But because it is difficult to accept Kiarostami’s interviews at face value, trying to discern what is being manipulated in this film offers no real value in its analysis or criticism. We know from the beginning that there is enough child abuse occurring among the students to warrant an exposé that focuses only on the most troubled victims (Kiarostami says that he picked the least academically inclined children, but of course there is a high correlation between the at-risk kids and the ones at the bottom of their class). There are repeated shots of the camera operator focusing a lens (without any onscreen sound) that were obviously thrown in after shooting. Kiarostami can be heard mostly off-camera asking questions and his physical presence is shown a few times. None of this is problematic or deceptive or even interesting, really, in the overall scheme of things. What is more important is the clear deterioration of the interviews as the film contrasts the best-mannered students with the most troubled, particularly the last child, whose extreme anxiety is not only disconcerting to watch, it makes one wish there had been some pathway for intervention. The child is terrified of the film crew and demands his friend accompany him in the room—for no reason, he claims. When his friend is interviewed separately, he says the other boy was scared to be in a room with adult strangers because he assumed they were going to close the door and beat him with a ruler. Because there is no observable cause for his panic, one senses that the child’s look of terror and his pleas for mercy are behavioral—more telling of his family situation. (Kiarostami does interview his father, albeit quite delicately, because a subtle and restrained approach discloses much more about the father’s half-hearted lies than straight-up interrogation.)

What emerges from this hour-long doc, consisting mostly of interviews with kids, is that the role of Iranian children is that of a scapegoat for any and all household problems.

There are a few noticeable trends among the children’s answers that divulge the systematic communication strategies they have been taught in order to survive in the classroom and at home. One comedic (though tragic) pattern emerges when every student righteously affirms their preference of homework over cartoons. In at least one case, Kiarostami does not even need to pose the question; the child immediately denounces cartoons over the value of “learning” derived from homework. Said homework is found to be perplexingly difficult, heavy in load, and more often than not composed of busy-work drills. Because teachers demand that students essentially teach themselves at home, homework absolutely requires the supervision of an older family member. Frequently, adults are too busy, illiterate or negligent to live up to this responsibility and are unsure how to help their children succeed. But the real contradiction lies in discipline and reward. Instead of acknowledging the hardships placed on children in completing their homework (they are physically punished at school if their homework is incomplete), many parents are quick to blame their kids for not acing every single test. Kiarostami asks most of the children about punishment, and while many are too shy initially, they almost always open up about who punishes them , the objects used in the beating, and its frequency. Many of them don’t understand what the word “praise” even means.

These children have been taught to lie, but they are too young to understand nuance to effectively pull off deception. The gravity of their situation becomes clear in a short period of time. In his fiction films, Kiarostami is capable of weaving the god-awful truths with the many lies of his proud characters, but in Homework  reality does the job for him. This does not make him lazy; the strategy communicates alarming real-life examples and demonstrates his strength in using different techniques to indirectly unearth the devastating results of questionable social behaviors in Iranian children. Many of his films do not feature the most uplifting of themes, and a few are downright depressing, but real-life circumstances mark Homework  as next-level devastation in Kiarostami’s oeuvre.

Part of  The Self-Reflexive Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami

• by Tina Hassannia
• Retrospective

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Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016)

IMDbPro Starmeter See rank

• 40 wins & 38 nominations

• Writer (segment Is There a Place to Approach?)

• first story

• Director (segment Is There a Place to Approach?)

• Director (segment Where is my Romeo?)

• Director (supervisor)

• In-development projects at IMDbPro

Personal details

• Abbas Kiorastamu
• 5′ 9″ (1.75 m)
• June 22 , 1940
• Tehran, Iran
• July 4 , 2016
• Paris, France (gastrointestinal cancer)
• Parvin Amir-Gholi 1969 - 1982 (divorced, 2 children)
• 2 Biographical Movies
• 1 Print Biography
• 4 Interviews

Did you know

• Trivia Jean-Luc Godard has said, "Film begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami ." According to Martin Scorsese , "Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema." When these words are quoted in front of Kiarostami, he winces most charmingly. "This admiration is perhaps more appropriate after I am dead," he says.
• Quotes In this type of cinema, whether working with actors or non-actors, as much as you do direct them, if you allow yourself to be directed by them, then the end result will be much more pleasing. The real and individual strengths of the actors is allowed to be expressed and is something that does affect the audience very deeply.
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