The Bread and Alley (1970) User Reviews

This is the commencement of Abbas Kiarostami's association with young children and non professional actors.

[FilmCriticLalitRao · 6/10 · 25 February 2009]

Bread and Alley is the first film directed by veteran Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.By making a small kid as a protagonist of this film, he has inaugurated a new trend of making films with young and non professional actors.It is because of this professional stance that we can state that Nan Va Koutcheh is a good short film not only for young children but also for adults of all age groups.It shows how some universal concepts are easily grasped by both young and old alike.The main theme of the film is a short tale about infantile fear and the extraordinary relationship which links a human being to an animal.At the core of this film is a boy who is carrying some loaves of bread for his family.The sentiment of fear has been depicted without any kind of maudlin albeit emotional theatricality as the child protagonist gives an honest as well as frank acting performance.This is the reason why the whole game of fear appears to be much too real.Scenes showing a dog interacting with a young boy are pure cinematographic joy.The background score is lovely too and provides a healthy listening opportunity to all and sundry.

In the loop

[Horst_In_Translation · 8/10 · 22 April 2016]

"Nan va Koutcheh" or "The Bread and Alley" is an Iranian 10-minute short film from over 45 years ago. It was the first career credit by renowned Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and he was slightly under 30 when he made this black-and-white film. Don't worry about the language as nobody is talking in here. It is about a boy who has to walk through an alley, but a stray dog is in the way, a pretty beautiful animal though. The ending was funny and shows that the dog is pretty smart, but what I liked most about the film is that it is about friendship and losing fear pretty much. This movie delivers from an emotional, from a dramatic and from a comedic perspective. An outstanding achievement and it's almost impossible to make a better debut work than Kiarostami did here. Most filmmakers do not achieve something like this one here in their long careers. I highly recommend "Nan va Koutcheh". A must-see for dog lovers. Quite a shame the actors (especially the boy) are not credited.

Endearing short film

[JuguAbraham · 8/10 · 12 December 2006]

The 10 minute film begins with a boy returning home through empty semi-urban alleys holding bread he has purchased for the family. He is merrily kicking an empty can as boy would a football. Suddenly a growling stray dog is in his way. The boy freezes in fear. He waits for someone to give him company to negotiate the alley. An old partly deaf man comes and the boy picks up the courage to follow him. But the old man enters a door in the alley and the boy is in square one.

He decides to throw a bit of the bread to the dog and negotiate the rest of the alley. The dog is happy and escorts the boy wagging his tail. At the door of his home, the boy's mother slams the door on the face of the dog.

Cut to the next day. The boy is negotiating the same alley and the dog with a bowl of milk or buttermilk. The boy has drunk some of it as he has a milk mustache in evidence. This time the dog is angry and the bowl of milk is dropped.

Why does the dog behave this way? The slammed door? It is for the viewer's interpretation.

This short was on show in a section on Early Iranian cinema at the on-going International Film Festival of Kerala, India

Interestingly dogs in some Muslim countries are not considered clean and not encouraged as pets. I wonder what the director Abbas Kiorastami's view on dogs are.

P.S. The film is shot in color. The film is not in b/w as stated by IMDb.

Ten minutes only, and a bunch of universes

[p_radulescu · 10/10 · 8 March 2010]

Ten minutes only, and a whole bunch of universes: the universe of narrow, long, empty streets, potentially oppressive, the universe of genuine fear, the universe of feelings of the animal: hostility, joy, disappointment.

A road within a spacial context rather arid, and situations emerging suddenly and developing on their own: from this first movie Kiarostami knew that the extraordinary is hidden in the banality of everyday; he knew that an artist is an observer, capturing any situation and letting it to develop on its own. Watch this first movie ten minutes long, watch Taste of Cherry, watch Ten: the same great artistic concept.

OUR EXPERIENCES ARE REFLECTED IN OUR BEHAVIOUR

[ankhiyanranjan · 9/10 · 19 August 2020]

Kiarostami's Bread and Alley captures the essence of the omnipresence of certain characteristics across all species; fear, anger, and attachment. While Kiarostami's work always manages to carry his patent features like, narrow lanes, and the world of children, every film delivers a message which has a pervasive presence. In Bread and Alley, the abandonment of the dog is what makes him hostile towards other people who walk down the street. He would have had a similar experience which he did with our protagonist with other children, who used food as a bait to pass by and then left him on the streets alone. This experience causes him to develop a defence mechanism where he tends to growl at people walking by, developing a wall before deciding to be their companion. While the film is restricted to the narrow lanes of Iran, the message comes across wide and clear and remains applicable to human behaviour as well, where people develop mechanisms in their behaviours according to their good and bad experiences.

An everyday worry of a child

[kofistos · 10/10 · 7 December 2016]

I liked the film because children and a dog, who are not mostly recognized as subjects by many film makers, are the main characters and the film shows their daily concerns in an unvarnished way. The child, who brings a loaf of bread to his house, confronts with the hardship of passing a dog-guarded territory. It is an everyday worry of a child so that this happened to me many times when I was a child. The child tries to develop tactics. At first, he looks around to find someone to pass the dog-guarded territory with. However his strategy fails when the man enters a house right before the dog. The child stops for a few seconds but he finds another solution and tries to get on well with the dog by giving a piece of bread. (At that point I thought that he will finish all of the bread step by step. However it did not happen as I guessed.) After the initial child passed the dog-guarded territory, other child faces with the same problematic and at that time something different occurs.