The First Movie of Kiarostami: Bread & Alley (1970)

Seyrouss Hassanpour, who plays the kid

نان و کوچه - Nan va Koutcheh (Bread & Alley), the first movie made by Kiarostami.

It was 1970, Kiarostami was leading the film department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) in Tehran.

Bread & Alley is 10 minutes long: a kid is going home carrying a loaf of bread. It's somewhere in the outskirts of the city, streets are narrow, long and empty. A dog starts barking and the kid is scared. What to do? Nobody's on the street. An old man suddenly appears and the kid tries to follow him, only the man stops shortly in front of his home, so the boy is again alone. He has the inspiration to throw a piece of bread to the dog. This completely changes the situation. The dog becomes friendly and follows cheerfully the boy. The boy arrives at home, the dog tries to follow his new friend inside, the boy's mother doesn't let him and shuts violently the gate; the dog gets again hostile.

Ten minutes only, and a whole bunch of universes: the universe of narrow, long, empty streets, potentially oppressive, the universe of genuine fear, the universe of feelings of the animal: hostility, joy, disappointment.

(video by faridb2000)

Says Kiarostami, Bread & Alley was my first experience in cinema and I must say a very difficult one. I had to work with a very young child, a dog, and an unprofessional crew except for the cinematographer, who was nagging and complaining all the time. Well, the cinematographer, in a sense, was right because I did not follow the conventions of film making that he had become accustomed to.

A road within a spacial context rather arid, and situations emerging suddenly and developing on their own: from this first movie Kiarostami knew that the extraordinary is hidden in the banality of everyday; he knew that an artist is an observer, capturing any situation and letting it to develop on its own. Watch this first movie ten minutes long, watch Taste of Cherry, watch Ten: the same great artistic concept.

(I'm in the Mood for Kiarostami)