Us is another story altogether. Proclaimed as one of the world's great living filmmakers by many critics, he is often less concerned with the conditions of everyday life than with questions of reality itself. Like Time for Drunken Horses , The Wind Will Carry Us is set in Iranian Kudistan, but may as well be in a different dimension. Its title is taken from a poem by Iran's Forough Farrokhzad, whose condensed, allusive language carried ages-old traditions of Persian poetry into settings Ezra Pound might have recognized. It's not surprising that everyday characters in The Wind Will Carry Us will, without fanfare or pretense, segue from discussing the weather into poetic bursts of language, even philosophical musings.
Poetry is still closer to everyday Iran than it is in prosaic America.
Kiarostami's plot is as cryptic as his filmmaking. Without a press kit it may be hard to understand that it concerns a documentary crew dispatched from Teheran to a remote Kurdish village, to record a peculiar funeral rite upon the death of the local matriarch. He wants very much for her to get on with it so he can return to his comfortable 21st-century life. But the film's strangeness leaves a stronger impression than its humor. We never see the other members of his crew, who are always off camera.