Where is the Friend's House?: a story of the simple and the complex

At times, I feel overwhelmed by the complexity of it all. Yet, is this specific feeling of complexity, not also a feeling of the absence of simplicity, something we might have lost along the way? And is this not felt when, for example, we read a quote by a wise person, feel the existential truth of it, but then, soon enough, when real life starts again, when we have to get back to our jobs, reality shatters the truth of a phrase that turned out to be too simple, too short, too small, to ever capture the complexity that we have to deal with every day.

There is a certain simplicity to life which our mind’s eye has more and more trouble finding as we grow older. The gift of childhood is the unforced and unintended dwelling in this simplicity. Everyone that has lived long enough recognizes to a certain extend the feeling of our lives becoming increasingly complex. Our relations with family, friends, lovers, our jobs and responsibilities, the societal pressure of keeping up with everyone else, trying to be a good person, understanding the world, society and its politics, the list goes on. As children, ideally (and obviously not always), our lives are not yet filled with these responsibilities, ideas, structures and nuances.

The fantastic movie خانه دوست كجاست؟ (Where is the Friend’s House?), by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, is a proof of the fact that we can still, even as adults, witness and feel this simplicity. Although most, if not all, adults in the movie obstruct the protagonist Ahmed in his endeavor, us, as the viewers of the movie, through the subtle cinema that this movie embodies, cannot but understand the simple, childlike energy that drives this story. The movie starts with a classroom full of boys, including the friends Ahmed and Mohamed. Because he did not make his homework in his notebook, Mohamed is given a stern warning by the teacher, who tells him that next time he will be in great trouble if he has not made his homework in his notebook. After leaving school, Ahmed realizes that he accidentally also took Mohamed’s notebook home, as both look the same. From the second Ahmed has realized his mistake, he is driven by a strong concern for his friend and an awareness of a potential injustice to come. Right away he asks his mother if he can go to Mohamed to bring him his notebook, but his mother barely listens to him. Ahmed repeating himself many times while being almost completely ignored by the adults he is talking to is something that happens several times throughout the story. When Ahmed is told to go buy some bread, he takes his chance and runs in the direction of the neighboring village where Mohamed lives. However, Ahmed has never been there, and has no idea where exactly his friend lives. He searches and he searches, but he does not find his friend’s house. Only way after it has gotten dark, Ahmed gives up and returns home. In the end, Ahmed has made the homework twice, for himself and for his friend, late at night, and all turns out well.

The movie is a wonderful, dream-like expression of the simpleness of childhood, of the urgency and directness that struck Ahmed and made him act, against all odds and obstructions, as bravely as he did. While he could have decided to, like he eventually did out of necessity, to make not only his own homework but also that of his friend, and hand the notebook to Mohamed before class, it must have seemed more just to Ahmed that he would give back the notebook to his friend so he could make the homework himself. And this justice was, without a second of doubt, more important than all the effort and the inevitable trouble that this would cost him. No morality, nor natural law, was needed for ethics to shine bright in the eyes of Ahmed. Only the simple intuition of a child.

During Ahmed’s quest, the adults are no use to him at all. Rather, they have only made his search much more difficult. For example, his grandpa makes him go buy cigarettes, even though he (grandpa) already has some. His idea would be, as he explains to another man, that children need to listen to their elderly, and that this is just a disciplinary exercise; morality. While the elderly are driven by complex ideas about what is right and what is not, Ahmed is instead guided by a simple intuition that is in no way articulated, that cannot be captured in any complex language. The result is a situation that makes one think of Kafka and his unmatched understanding of bureaucracy. Ahmed is led here and there, never reaching his point of destination. Just like Josef K in Der Prozess, Ahmed does not even exactly know what he is looking for. All he encounters are figures that are unhelpful or point, or even bring, him in the wrong direction.

There is a similarity between the feeling of an increasing and inevitable complexity of life, which we experience more as we get older, and the experience of bureaucracy that Kafka understood so well. Does it not often feel like we are chasing something without knowing what this ‘something’ actually is, if it is even there (where?). If that is so, and Ahmed’s encounters with the adults can similarly be understood as complex and ‘bureaucratic’, then Ahmed and his childhood appear as that which is not incorporated into this ‘complexity’, but resists without trying. While he is obviously impeded by it, his simple, direct relation to the world and his life prevent him from becoming a part of the system.

However, simplicity is not something that comes before complexity, nor are these two opposites. The children are among us. And simply characterizing childhood as a heaven of simplicity is also not just. Childhood is filled with its own logic, its own complexity, as becomes clear by the concern displayed in the facial expressions of Ahmed. Is not, actually, the realm of the grown-ups there where true simplicity resides? The grown-ups know what is going on and what needs to be done, they have everything under control, while I, only a child, live in confusion and ignorance. خانه دوست كجاست؟ is a movie about the distance between these two perspectives, and how they inhabit the same world. We need rules, ideas, structures to organize ourselves (or, at least, let’s assume for now that this is true to a certain extend). And children need our guidance to survive. But what seems to happen too often, and which in fact is an instinctively well-known truth that has been expressed already many times, is that our need of childhood is often forgotten. The child reminds us that a life outside of the hustle of the everyday, outside of rules and morality, is still there. That, although we will always be in relation to bureaucracy and relationships, there is also our breathing that has little to do with them. Ahmed shows us that you can still stop. Do nothing for a bit, and let new ideas flow in. The idea that, some of the things that we engage in perhaps do not matter that much in relation to other things. Why should I go get bread if I still have Mohamed’s notebook, and he will get punished tomorrow, even expelled from school!?

Hannah Arendt already showed how banal evil is, how the everyday can become absolute horror. However, there is also, all of us, the ability to return to a childlike breathing, to just stop for a moment, let our tasks rest for a second, and look around with new eyes.

It makes absolutely no sense anymore to hide behind the mask of complexity when it comes to the Israël-Palestine conflict (it has not done so for many, many years already). At the moment I am writing this, the 25th of November 2024, the live tracker on this conflict of Al Jazeera states that on the side of Israël, 1.139 people have been killed and 8.730 people have been injured. In Palestine, at least 44.179 people have been killed, among which 17.492 children, more than 104 thousand people have been injured, and at least 11.000 people have gone missing. 17.492 children have been killed. This has nothing to do with ‘complexity.’ This is brute force committing genocide.  

What I am saying here is obviously not that there is no complexity to the history of this conflict. There is, much of it. However, what should absolutely not happen is that this complexity turns into a cloak, an argumentative and mitigating machine, that can be strategically or unconsciously used to cover some facts that are clear and simple. The gaze of the child is not yet muddled by the weapon-turned narratives of complexity (which are, paradoxically, themselves the most simple things; to just say 'it is complex') and sees the masses of their potential friends, the other kids, being slaughtered.

To turn a text on the topic of childhood, which is displayed in such a great movie as the one mentioned above, towards the topic of war and genocide is not a rhetoric device to gain seeming argumentative power; it is only a (ridiculously minimal) reflection of the facts that take place, of the state of the world.