Children of Heaven

The Iranian cinema may have reinvented the children's movie, but for a little while into Majid Majidi's generically titled Children of Heaven, it seems Iranian filmmakers might be starting to recycle it. The scenario is familiar from Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House? and Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon and The Mirror: adorable Teheran urchins struggle against Sisyphean obstacles and unhelpful, insensitive adults to achieve mundane goals. In this case the problematic item is a pair of pink shoes. Eight-year-old Ali (Amir Farrokh Hashemian) gets distracted at the grouchy fruit peddlar's stand and the newly repaired slippers he's bringing home for his younger sister Zahra (Bahare Sediqi) are appropriated by a rag picker. Afraid to tell his parents, he and Zahra work out a scheme by which they share his battered sneakers.

A lot of time seems spent following earnest children running through back alleys until Majidi opens his film up with a Bicycle Thief-inspired interlude that gives Ali and his dad (Amir Naji) a chance to bond and see how the other half lives when they seek gardening work in the rich quarter. Majidi opens it further when Ali enters a state-sponsored road race with hopes of winning not first prize but third -- a pair of running shoes. With TV cameramen adding an element of self-reflexivity, Heaven ends on a note of gentle but resolute irony: aspiration meets with frustration even when it succeeds, and true peace and joy, like the goldfish in the pool into which Ali sinks his blistered feet, lie under the shifting surface of our daily cares. At the Avon.
-- Peter Keough