Children of Heaven was the first Iranian film to be nominated for an Oscar, so it comes highly recommended. A Bicycle Thieves for kids, it tries to capture the pain and joyfulness of childhood. Never have a pair of shoes played so great a part in the plot of a full-length feature. Indeed, the story is almost too light to sustain the 89 minutes that the film lasts. Ali loses his sister’s shoes when he puts them down to buy some potatoes and brother and sister spend the rest of the film trying to keep this fact hidden from their impoverished parents and school teachers. Whether this is a charming look at the interaction between family members or an attempt to find more drama than the situation truly allows is up for debate. Given the Oscar nomination most people seem to come down on the former proposition.
What is most interesting about the film is the depiction of life in Tehran, with its clear divisions between rich and poor, adult and child. The streets seem cleaned up and too much like a movie set, although I have not visited Tehran yet, so maybe it is always that clean. As always with a film from a country with different traditions it is interesting to see aspects of a different culture. The taking of tea, the piles of shoes at prayer. Pulling the thread out of a rug to make a ball of wool, the differing attitudes to children, the freer attitudes to health and safety.
Some things transcend national boundaries and the film does a great job of showing the developing relationship between father and son as they seek work in the rich part of town. The prickly relationships between children are the same worldwide, quick to anger and forgive and Iranian kids are no different. To hammer home the neo-realist credentials the father pushes a bicycle, which causes the most Hollywoodesque moment in the whole film. The director also follows in the footsteps of Rossellini et al by relying heavily on the facial expressions of the young protagonists.
The film is aimed at children, but being in Farsi English-speaking children of the age depicted in the film will be unable to read the subtitles. For older children children of Heaven would be an informative introduction to life in non-Western countries. As such it would be well worth watching.
Iran, 1997
Directed by Majid Majidi
89 mins
Original language – Farsi
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