In 1990 two earthquakes destroyed large areas of Northern Iran. Forty thousand people died and fifty thousand were wounded. It was in this same region that Kiarostami shot his feature film Where is the House of my Friend? in 1987. As a result, he decided to return to the area later with his son to see whether the two children who played the lead in the film were still alive. Zendegi Edame Darad is the fictional report of their quest.A father and his little son ride in a car the ruins. They meet people who have all lost relatives. The road to the villages they want to visit has been destroyed and from time to time they help people along the way. Between the acts, an aerial is installed because they have to watch soccer: the World Cup quarter finals. Life goes on…Kiarostami provides an unsentimental and almost documentary visual report on the suffering which the earthquake has caused. Kiarostami: ‘We wanted to find out whether the children were still alive after the earthquake and we found life.’Olivier Seguret (Libération) wrote of the film: ‘The form is basically documentary, but countless human fictions bubble out of it.’ Zendegi Edame Darad was awarded the Rossellini Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.
