A difficult film to decipher without context, 'The Wind Will Carry Us' is set on the Iranian countryside, a small yellow clay town with its charming and eccentric inhabitants. The story is about a crew of men coming from the big city to spend some time in the town for their own, secret reasons. A significant portion of the film is spent following the lead walking around town conversing with a schoolboy and driving to the top of a nearby hill to get better cell phone reception.
The film is humorous and humanistic, it puts the character in a difficult and unfamiliar situation and you endlessly sympathize with him, while not always completely understanding him. I took the clues spread in the film to mean that there is a traditional mourning practice in the village where the women hurt and scar themselves, and the protagonist is part of a documentary film crew wanting to film the tradition to spread awareness and maybe get it to stop, but in order to do so they must wait until a person dies. There is no funeral ritual before there is a death! This macabre intention - waiting for someone to die - gets on you, it spreads the man thin, getting on his nerves, and the acting really drives that in. It's a subtle but powerful performance.
All in all, the film is both distressing and funny.
The film is humorous and humanistic, it puts the character in a difficult and unfamiliar situation and you endlessly sympathize with him, while not always completely understanding him. I took the clues spread in the film to mean that there is a traditional mourning practice in the village where the women hurt and scar themselves, and the protagonist is part of a documentary film crew wanting to film the tradition to spread awareness and maybe get it to stop, but in order to do so they must wait until a person dies. There is no funeral ritual before there is a death! This macabre intention - waiting for someone to die - gets on you, it spreads the man thin, getting on his nerves, and the acting really drives that in. It's a subtle but powerful performance.
All in all, the film is both distressing and funny.