The Son in Frame, the Father in Question: On Leech (2021)

It's 1994. Bahman has failed seven subjects, and his father, Abbas Kiarostami, is furious: "A child's duty is to study" (though getting good grades isn't incidental). He blames Bahman's failure on the four days he spent shooting his own film, but both of them know that's not the real reason; he failed the previous year too.

Kiarostami tries to shame his son by appealing to his own moral framework: that Bahman provides no value to society—a leech, eating, drinking, smoking, doing nothing. Not only does Bahman not share this worldview, he knows there's no practical need for him to study. "I certainly won't have money troubles." Bahman reveals a limit of his father's moral framework. It's a response his father has no answer to.

At this point, Kiarostami’s only recourse is to lash out and hope that time will prove him right. Unable to understand his son, he positions the "objective" camera facing Bahman, but the parent-child quarrel (and Bahman's humiliation) has already taken place before filming begins. What he records is not the real conflict, but a reenactment and its aftermath intended as future evidence of his son’s mistake, "like in the film Close-Up," as he puts it.

Nine years later, nothing has changed. Contrary to his father's prediction, Bahman has not ended up in the gutter, nor does he feel ashamed of his youthful mistakes. Instead, he decides to continue this very film, insultingly pleased with his work.

Kiarostami, aware of his loss and unhappy to have become material for his son's film, delivers the final blow: "All your values are anti-values. You can't see properly. That's why you pointed the camera at yourself again; otherwise you would have pointed it at me, not yourself." He interprets a formal cinematic decision as moral failure, reading the camera’s orientation as evidence of his son's inability to see the world correctly, and, by extension, his failure as a filmmaker.

Bahman, however, understands that time is on his side and feels no need to respond. If, in his father's earlier film Homework (1989), Kiarostami used questions to reveal the individual through their answers, here the dynamic is reversed. With the camera trained on Bahman, it is Kiarostami's own questions and accusations that gradually expose his own frustration and anger.

If the future belongs to Bahman, then so does the past. The film therefore opens with a clip from Homework, the camera fixed on a much younger Bahman as he struggles to complete a fill-in-the-blanks exam question: "Children are [divine blessings] entrusted to the hands of fathers and mothers, and everyone must strive to [protect and keep] them."

By opening with footage from his father's film, Bahman reverses their relationship. What was once Abbas's account of his son is reframed as Bahman's account of his father.

Watch the film on YouTube