Le Petit Cinéma Club continues with an early treasure from Abbas Kiarostami made while he was working at the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (also known as Kanoon) in Iran.

Having directed a series of neo-realist films about children’s lives, Kiarostami opted for a new approach in making films for children starting with 1975’s So Can I. Blending live-action with animation, So Can I saw Kiarostami experiment with new techniques that reflected the imaginative capacity of the kids featured in his projects and for whom his work was intended. All of the aforementioned films — and more — are also available to stream via The Criterion Channel’s excellent collection “Abbas Kiarostami’s Childhood Films.”

In So Can I, two schoolchildren watch the movement of animated animals on TV and mimic them in real-life. When a kangaroo hops, one of them starts jumping across the screen; when a monkey swings on vines, the same boy climbs a tree; and, having seen a bird fly, he exclaims “So can I!” before boarding a plane. Kiarostami’s juxtapositions are simple, but provide the kids in his films the ability to be inventive and the viewer to draw connections between animal and human behavior.

“It’s for kids but, in my opinion, the idea is still intellectual. The concept is for adults. When you look at the film it’s childish, because of the music, because of the animation, because of the acting. It was one of the experiments that I did at Kanoon. We really were just experimenting.” ABBAS KIAROSTAMI

The schoolchildren featured in So Can I are Kiarostami’s son Ahmad and animator Nafiseh Riahi’s son Kamal. Riahi contributed the animated segments in the film and her work as a painter earned her international renown later on. While Kiarostami was more or less averse to cartoons and popular animation, he found Riahi’s work “modern”; for him, “animation should begin where humans cannot do the job. It should be a dream.”

Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema occupies a distinguished place in the medium’s history. He first rose to prominence with The Koker Trilogy (1987 – 1994), a series of films about daily life in a rural town in northern Iran. His subsequent work earned him recognition at prestigious film festivals across the world, including the Palme D’Or, which he won when Taste of Cherry premiered at Cannes in 1997. He demonstrated a willingness to experiment and challenge the conventions of film throughout his life, producing a body of work that remains influential to this day.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Criterion and MK2. An additional note of gratitude to Orfeo Tagiuri for this wonderful animated introduction, which precedes each film in this series.