The Wind Will Carry Us
The Wind Will Carry Us
7.497%84%
Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.
CrossCutCritic reviewedMay 9, 2025
The Wind Will Carry Us
To You, Who Waited for Something to End—and Found Yourself Changed Instead
“O you who believe, seek help through patience and prayer. Surely God is with those who are patient.”
— Qur’an 2:153
I. You Came for the Death. But She Would Not Die.
You had a purpose.
You had a timeline.
You arrived in a village with a camera in your mind
and an obituary already forming in your head.
But she wouldn’t die.
And so you waited.
And the longer you waited,
the less you remembered why you came.
This is your story.
In Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, a man—perhaps a journalist, perhaps a documentarian—travels to a remote Kurdish village,
ostensibly to record a cultural mourning ritual.
But the old woman he came to witness refuses to die.
So he waits.
And in that waiting,
something sacred begins.
Not miracles.
Not revelations.
Just dust, goats, phone calls from a hillside,
and the slow undoing of control.
This is not a film about death.
It’s a film about what we become when death refuses to come on schedule.
Kiarostami does not give us drama.
He gives us silence with weight.
He gives us God hidden behind doors we are not allowed to open.
If you’ve ever come prepared to manage a loss,
only to be left sitting beside life as it refused to follow your plan—
then you already know this gospel.
It is not triumphant.
It is slow.
And in that slowness,
you may begin to hear the sound
the wind carries
when you stop asking it to speak.
---
II. The God Who Stays Behind the Door
You never see her.
The woman whose death you came to capture—
she is always just behind a door,
up a staircase,
under a blanket,
out of frame.
You ask.
You wait.
You climb hills to get cell reception,
and still, no answer.
This is not poor storytelling.
It is theology.
Kiarostami constructs absence the way others construct plot.
The film becomes a meditation on what we are not allowed to see.
On the ache of waiting for something final—
and being given nothing
but a cup of tea
and the call to return tomorrow.
This is the God of Job,
the God of Elijah’s silence,
the Deus absconditus—
not missing,
but hidden.
And in that hiddenness,
your protagonist—like you—starts to change.
He becomes gentler.
Less hurried.
He begins to notice the boy digging a ditch,
the widow who pours his tea,
the light falling over graves that don’t yet need filling.
He came to document death.
He stays to observe life
with nothing left to report.
If you’ve ever stood outside a room where something holy was supposed to happen
and found yourself met only by quiet—
then you’ve already encountered this God.
Not in thunder.
Not in the dying.
But in the fact
that nothing happened
and you were still seen.
---
III. The Ditch, the Dust, and the Small Resurrection
A boy digs a ditch.
You ask him why.
He shrugs.
It’s for a telephone pole that may never be installed.
You climb the hill again to make another call.
You are not getting answers.
But slowly, imperceptibly,
you stop needing them.
This is not enlightenment.
It is unlearning.
The ditch is never finished.
The death never arrives.
The ritual never takes place.
But in the meantime,
you learn to sit.
You learn to ask questions you don’t need to answer.
You learn to drink tea the way the villagers do—without urgency.
You learn to live in a world that does not revolve around your project.
This is the small resurrection:
not life reborn,
but self surrendered.
You begin to die to your agenda,
your clarity,
your narrative arc.
And in its place,
you receive
a goat’s bleat,
a child’s silence,
the wind moving through unburied time.
If you’ve ever stopped pursuing a resolution
and instead found grace in the waiting—
not because anything changed,
but because you did—
then you already know this ditch.
It leads nowhere.
But you remember it.
Because it was here
that you stopped needing the woman to die,
and began to wonder
what it means to live.
---
IV. The Poetry of the Unfinished
There are no wide shots of revelation.
No music swells.
No answers descend.
Instead, there is a well that echoes.
A grave that remains unfilled.
A poem recited to no one in particular.
> “The moon is in the sky,
and so am I,
waiting for the wind to carry us…”
The line hovers.
It doesn’t explain.
It hovers.
This is Kiarostami’s final gift:
to offer a cinema that refuses resolution,
but opens something deeper than clarity—
presence.
The man leaves the village at the end.
We are not sure what he found.
Only that he came seeking death
and left touched by something quieter.
Perhaps that is all the gospel needs to be sometimes:
not a proclamation,
but a held silence.
A breath.
A shadow across a field.
The sound of wind that refuses to deliver a message
but still moves the leaves.
If you’ve ever written poems in the margins of your grief,
if you’ve ever loved someone who did not die when they were supposed to—
and it changed you anyway—
then you already know this unfinished grace.
Because sometimes the cross is not an event.
It is a place.
And sometimes that place is a village
where nothing happens
and God stays just behind the door.
---
V. A Theology of Waiting
We are not good at waiting.
We want the woman to die.
We want the poem to explain itself.
We want God to come out from behind the door.
But The Wind Will Carry Us teaches us
that waiting is not the absence of meaning—
it is the form meaning sometimes takes.
Kiarostami refuses to give us what we came for.
And in doing so,
he gives us everything we needed.
This is not a film about death.
It is a film about transformation through patience.
About the kind of waiting that isn’t empty,
but full of unnoticed grace.
A grave not dug.
A woman not seen.
A conversation overheard.
A poem whispered into dust.
This is the cross,
not as spectacle,
but as slow surrender.
The man leaves the village.
The woman may still be alive.
Or not.
What we know is that he has changed.
He arrived expecting a ritual.
He left having lived one.
If you’ve ever waited for something to break
and found yourself breaking instead—
this film is your mirror.
It doesn’t end.
It abides.
Like the wind,
carrying more than we know,
moving even when we don’t understand where it comes from
or where it is going.
---
Postscript
Some gospels are whispered into hillsides.
Some liturgies unfold beneath goats and unfinished ditches.
Some epiphanies arrive
only when you’ve given up looking for them.
The Wind Will Carry Us is a theology of divine hiddenness—
a slow, dry unveiling of presence through absence,
grace through delay.
It asks nothing of you but this:
Be still.
Stay long enough.
And let the wind do what only the wind can.
---
If You’ve Walked with This Film, You May Also Be Carried By:
Winter Light (in progress) – For those who prayed in silence and heard no reply.
Ordet – When resurrection waits too long and still comes.
The Tree of Life – A whisper of grace hidden in the wounds of family and time.
Tokyo Story – A liturgy for quiet parents and the children who forgot to ask.
Late Spring – When nothing is said and everything is lost.