And Life Goes On

Life, and Nothing More...
Directed by	Abbas Kiarostami
Written by	Abbas Kiarostami
Produced by	Ali Reza Zarrin
Starring	Farhad Kheradmand Buba Bayour
Cinematography	Homayun Payvar
Edited by	Abbas Kiarostami Changiz Sayad
Running time	95 minutes
Country	Template:Film Iran
Language	Persian

Life, and Nothing More... (Zendegi va digar hich) (1991) is an Iranian film directed by Abbas Kiarostami. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. It is considered the second film in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy.

After the 1990 earthquake in Iran that killed over 30,000 people, Kiarostami went to search for the stars of his previous film Where Is the Friend's Home?. This film is a semi-fictional work based on these events, shot in a documentary-style. It shows a director (played by Farhad Kheradmand) on this journey through the country in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Plot

A film director and his son start a journey towards Koker, the place where half of the film of Where is the Friend's Home was filmed. During the first half of the film they try to find the right highway to reach the village since most of the roads have been damaged or blocked by the earthquake, meanwhile they cross paths with several locals that have experienced the damage and ask directions often to reach their goal.

After changing the route several times they finally reach one of the villages in which the film was staged, they visit one of the actors of the first movie and stay near him for a while. Both father and son visit the destroyed village and hear more stories of those who survived, among them a young married couple that lost their relatives in the disaster but decided to marry anyways since the dead did not foresee their demise, so in answer they prefer to live on and marry. The scene with this couple is a focal point of the third film of the Koker trilogy, Through the Olive Trees.

Later on they find one of the kids that played a part in the film and take him to the tents where most of the people whose house were destroyed in Koker stay. The son of the director wants to watch the final match of the Football World Cup with the other kids and his father decides to leave him there and come back later to pick him up. He discusses there with other people that were victims of the earthquake and finds out amazed the spirit they have to move on with life.

As the director struggles to reach the town in his car, he passes a man carrying a tank and goes up to a hill until the engine gets too hot and he is unable to continue. The man with the tank helps him to restart the engine and then he seemingly leaves as the man goes uphill walking. The director's car races several meters before trying to climb the hill again and after he makes it, the director picks the tank-man with him. With this scene, the movie goes black.

Part in the trilogy

Life, and Nothing More... is the second film of the Koker trilogy in which the first film: Where Is the Friend's Home? is seen as a piece of fiction where the main character is looking for the actors that played in it. In turn, the second film in the trilogy is seen as a piece of fiction inside Through the Olive Trees where the story focuses on the actors that played in one scene this film. Each of the films seem to jump to a higher reality where the previous one is seen as fiction, because of this, the filmmaker himself (Kiarostami) is fictionalized in the third and second film (twice in the former).

External links

• And Life Goes On at IMDb