Majid Majidi’s film “Children of Heaven” (Bacheha-Ye aseman, 1997) is another story about how poor people lived in Iran. The main characters are Ali, he is 9 years old, he is in the third grade, and Zahra, she is 7 years old, she is in the first grade. The family is very poor, the father works, the mother is sick, even the doctor forbade
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Majid Majidi’s film “Children of Heaven” (Bacheha-Ye aseman, 1997) is another story about how poor people lived in Iran. The main characters are Ali, he is 9 years old, he is in the third grade, and Zahra, she is 7 years old, she is in the first grade. The family is very poor, the father works, the mother is sick, even the doctor forbade her to do homework, although she often violates the ban, there is still a baby in the family, so the older children unquestioningly perform homework. And one day, Ali, once again going on household chores, repairing his sister’s torn shoes and buying groceries, loses his repaired shoes. He put them in front of the vegetable shop, and the garbage man passing by took the bag for a garbage bag and took it. Ali tries to find the shoes, thinking that they fell somewhere between the boxes of fruits and vegetables, but throwing them over only attracts the anger of the owner of the store. At home, he is forced to tell Zahra about the disappearance, but begs her not to tell her parents, especially her father, because then he will fly both of them, and his father has no money for new shoes. They did not pay for the rent of a poor dwelling for five months and owed in the shop. And then he comes up with a scheme - in the morning Zahra goes to school in Ali's sneakers, although they are big for her, and at lunch they meet, change shoes and Ali runs to his school. Not everything goes smoothly in this process, and some other things happen, but in the end everything ends well. As they say, there would be no happiness, but misfortune helped - Ali learned to run fast and won the city competitions in the 4 km run. The kids will get shoes and sneakers. I read that some versions of the film in the form of an epilogue show how Ali’s successful career as an athlete developed in the future, although he studied well. The plot is very acutely social, we see the contrast between the poor and rich strata of the population, mainly, however, in contrasting the appearance of different areas of the city, we see the hard life of the poor, we see the tough upbringing of the younger generation. It was very realistic, and the kids played well.
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