Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye Aseman)
Special Screening - Doha Tribecca Film Festival 2012
Majid Majidi / Feature Narrative / Iran / 1997 / 89 min / Colour / HDCAM / In Persian / Arabic, English subtitles / N/A
Rated: General Audiences. Suitable for ages 4 and up.
Synopsis
Majid Majidi’s delightful, crowd-pleasing ‘Children of Heaven’ belongs to a category of Iranian films that has never had the slightest difficulty reaching audiences around the world: stories about children told through the eyes of the kids themselves. Here, the film starts with the kind of small-scale mishap that can appear catastrophic to a child: Ali loses the pink school shoes of Zahra, his beloved sister, while out shopping for groceries. The children devise a plan to stop their parents finding out about the loss, developing a system that will allow them to share his shoes. With its tender portrait of a family struggling to get by in an increasingly affluent Tehran – Ali’s out-of-work father spends much of the film looking for work in the wealthy suburbs – ‘Children of Heaven’ won the Grand Prix des Amériques in Montreal in 1997 and was nominated for an Oscar in 1999.
About the Director
Award-winning Iranian director Majid Majidi was born in 1959 and was raised in Tehran. His debut film, ‘Baduk’ (1992), was presented at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. ‘Children of Heaven’ (1997) won the Best Picture at the Montreal World Film Festival and was nominated for Best Foreign Film Academy Award.
Credits
- Director
- Majid Majidi
- Screenwriter
- Majid Majidi
- Producer
- Amir Esfandiari, Mohammad Esfandiari
- Editor
- Hassan Hasssandoost
- Music
- Kayvan Jahanshahi
- Cinematographer
- Parviz Malekzaade
- Cast
- Mir Farrokh Hashemian, Nafise Jafar Mohammadi, Bahare Seddiqi, Amir Naji, Fereshte Sarabandi, Mohammad-Hasan Hosseinian