Towards a Poetics of Childhood Ethics in Abbas Kiarostami’s Children’s Films

Abstract

Abbas Kiarostami began his cinematic career with works for and about children. Despite the significance of this early phase of his oeuvre for Iranian cinema, little has been done to analyse the dynamics of ethics in these films. We argue that there are two major conditions at the heart of ethics in Kiarostami’s children’s films: children are either engaged in moments of altruism which intend to fulfil their responsibility towards the “other”, or attempt to go beyond this “responsibility” by resisting the codes and laws of the “other” to reach a sense of liberated individuality. This chapter offers a new definition of ethics in which Kiarostami does not suggest absolute ethical statements but engages the audience in ethical questions. It illustrates children’s roles in relation to adults, families, and educational systems, and claims that children continue to discover ways to evade dominant discourses.