According to the Iranian Cinema Museum News Agency, the 11th Ulju Mountain Film Festival, which focuses on films addressing mountains, nature, adventure, the environment, and human experience, will present three films produced by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (IIDCYA)—Bread and Alley, Orderly or Disorderly, and The Chorus—alongside three films by Abbas Kiarostami: Take Me Home (2016), No (2010), and Ten (2002).
The selection of these six films offers a glimpse into Kiarostami’s several-decade cinematic career, encompassing a range of works from his early period to his later filmmaking years.
Festival programmers have designed the selection as a cinematic journey from Bread and Alley to Take Me Home. These two films mark the beginning and the end of the journey, respectively, and in a sense reflect the connections between the concepts of the alley, movement, and the road that recur throughout Kiarostami’s cinematic world.
The presentation of these works at the Ulju Mountain Film Festival provides an opportunity to introduce part of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinematic legacy, as well as the internationally significant productions of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.
The 11th Ulju Mountain Film Festival will be held in South Korea from September 18 to 22, 2026.
A Program Inspired by Kiarostami’s Cinematic Journey
In her introduction to this year’s selection, festival programmer Gina Lee writes that the festival’s Human section is built around a central keyword: “challenge.” The section explores different worlds that the screen can encompass through two distinct cinematic paths, with the second focusing on a master who helped create the conditions for such experiences: Abbas Kiarostami.
Throughout his professional life, Kiarostami crossed boundaries between different media and broke down the barriers between fiction and documentary, allowing him to look at the world with greater depth.
His feature film Ten, which took advantage of the freedom offered by digital filmmaking to capture natural and convincing performances from non-professional actors, might never have come into being without the bold experiment of Orderly or Disorderly, a work that placed order and disorder side by side.
What Kiarostami learned during his years at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults—including seeing the world from a child’s perspective, working with non-professional actors, and transforming small events from everyday life into stories—can be seen in three of his early short films featured in this year’s program: Bread and Alley, The Chorus, and Orderly or Disorderly.
The film No subtly moves away from this approach, using close-ups and off-screen sound to portray a child’s direct and steadfast assertion of a sense of self.
From his earliest cinematic challenge to his final farewell to cinema, Kiarostami’s filmmaking was consistently associated with one particular space: the alley. An exploration that began in the narrow alley of his first film, Bread and Alley, continues in his later short film Take Me Home, where the camera moves freely through the stairways and alleys of southern Italy.
The selection of Kiarostami’s films in this year’s program is a letter from the philosopher of the road—a filmmaker who always kept his compassionate gaze toward children close to his heart, captured diverse human lives on screen, and consistently entrusted the ultimate interpretation and meaning of his works to the audience.