Homework (1989)
Abbas Kiarostami is one of those filmmakers whose reputation tends to precede him in a slightly intimidating way. Celebrated across European festival circuits and academic film culture from the late 1980s onward, the Iranian director built a body of work that consistently turned modest, everyday subjects into something that critics reached for grand language to describe. His association with The Salesman (2016) director Asghar Farhadi's broader generation of Iranian art cinema, and with the socially conscious work produced under the Islamic Republic's surprisingly active cultural institutions, places him at the centre of one of world cinema's more unlikely golden periods. Homework arrives from 1989, a decade into the Islamic Revolution and just one year after the devastating Iran-Iraq War finally ceased, a moment when Iranian society was still processing enormous upheaval, including the question of what education, obedience, and childhood looked like inside a theocratic state. That historical backdrop matters rather a lot when you sit down to watch what is, on the surface, a very quiet film about very small children.
The film was produced through Kanoon, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, an Iranian state body that had been, somewhat paradoxically, a genuine incubator of serious cinema both before and after the revolution. Kiarostami himself had been a Kanoon filmmaker for years before Homework, having worked through the organisation on short films and features that examined children's lives with a documentary-leaning eye. This was not a big-budget production by any measure, and it was never intended to be. Kiarostami functions here as his own on-screen interlocutor, conducting the interviews himself, which gives the film an unusually personal quality even as it resists almost every conventional documentary technique. Fans of Iranian non-fiction filmmaking may also find points of comparison with the formally stripped-back work seen in films like A Few Cubic Meters of Love (2014) or, further back, Forough Farrokhzad's extraordinary The House Is Black (1963), though Kiarostami's approach here is considerably more inert than either of those.
In terms of cast, the word barely applies. Iraj Safavi appears in an administrative capacity, and Kiarostami himself is the interviewer, a calm, patient presence just off-camera. The real performers, if you can call them that, are the schoolboys themselves, a rotating stream of seven and eight-year-olds whose responses range from cheerful to nervous to visibly coached. None of them are actors, and that is entirely the point. What you are watching is closer to ethnographic observation than to anything with a script, and the children's unguarded moments carry a weight that no professional performance could manufacture. Whether that is enough to sustain seventy-eight minutes is, of course, the question.
Homework (1989), directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is a stark, minimalist documentary that does exactly what its title suggests: the filmmaker sits with Iranian schoolchildren in the late 1980s and asks them simple, direct questions about their homework, their teachers, and their feelings toward school. Shot in a single location with no music, no narration, and no stylistic flourish, the film feels less like a crafted documentary and more like an unedited archival record. For viewers interested in Kiarostami's broader filmography or in the social history of post-revolutionary Iran, it offers a fascinating, unvarnished glimpse into a specific moment in time.
And that is precisely its value: as a time capsule. The children's responses (earnest, anxious, sometimes rehearsed, sometimes startlingly candid) reveal subtle truths about education, authority, and childhood under a theocratic regime. Kiarostami's quiet, observational approach allows their voices to speak for themselves, and there's a raw authenticity that later, more polished documentaries often lack. If you approach Homework as an anthropological document rather than a narrative film, it holds genuine historical interest.
But beyond that archival curiosity, the film offers little to sustain engagement. There is no narrative arc, no thematic development, and no cinematic craft beyond the basic act of recording. The repetitive structure (question, answer, next child) can feel monotonous, and the lack of context or reflection leaves the viewer to do all the interpretive work. It's not lacking because it's old; it's lacking because it refuses to shape its material into anything more than a series of interviews.
Homework is an interesting, historically valuable document that captures a fleeting moment in Iranian social history with admirable restraint. But as a viewing experience, it's austere to the point of austerity, more artifact than film. Worth watching for Kiarostami completists or scholars of Middle Eastern cinema, but unlikely to resonate with general audiences seeking story, emotion, or cinematic dynamism.
Homework sits in an interesting corner of world cinema, the kind of film that documentary enthusiasts and scholars of Iranian society will find genuinely rewarding, while general audiences may find it a polished but unremarkable viewing evening. It belongs to a tradition of observational non-fiction, closer in spirit to some of the reflective, essayistic work found in films like Letter from Siberia (1957) than to anything built around conventional storytelling, though it lacks the wit and formal playfulness of that tradition. For anyone working their way through Kiarostami's filmography, or through the wider landscape of Iranian cinema covered elsewhere on this site in reviews like A Separation (2011), it is a worthwhile stop on the map. Just don't expect the journey itself to be particularly comfortable.
Rating: — | Year: 1989 | Watched: 2026-05-26
Where to watch (US)
Stream: Criterion Channel
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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