Babek Ahmed Poor

Babek Ahmed Poor was a local Iranian kid cast as the lead star of Abbas Kiarostami's film Where Is the Friend's House? (1987). In the award winning film, Poor plays a conflicted boy concerned in finding his best friend's house so he can return a notebook containing his lessons, an important task to get delivered on the following day and the urgency comes to avoid a possible expulsion of his friend from school. Babek wasn't a trained actor and on most the scenes, the director simply told him to present and recreate actions things that were part of his daily life. He proved to be a good natural actor. A few years after the film's release, the northern part of Iran suffered a massive earthquake that killed thousands of people in 1990, known as the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake. Kiarostami was concerned about Babek's fate after the tragedy since not only the director was shooting his new film near the place but he knew the boy lived around there. His search for the kid become the basis of And Life Goes On (1992), where Kiarostami recreates such events of finding Babek, who survived the earthquake and lived long enough to appear as himself in another film from the director, the highly acclaimed Through the Olive Trees (1994), selected at the 1994's Cannes Film Festival.