Children of Heaven

On the data. One film, and it is an object lesson in making small things enormous. Nothing in it is dangerous by any ordinary measure. A boy loses some shoes. The film makes that as tense as a thriller by making clear what the loss would cost a family with nothing to spare. It was the first Iranian film nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign language film, in 1999. It lost to Life Is Beautiful. The closing race is one of the most quietly devastating sequences in cinema, and what the boy is trying to achieve in it is not what a sports film would have him trying to achieve. Majid Majidi cast non-professional children and worked with them over a long period, which is standard practice in Iranian cinema of that era and part of why those films feel the way they do. It was a rare Iranian commercial success at home as well as abroad.

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