This film manages both to be heartwarming and more anxiety inducing than most thrillers. The stakes should be pretty low: the essential plot is very simple - an eight-year-old boy realizes he has taken home his classmate's exercise book as well as his own, knowing that the same classmate is under threat of being expelled if he fails (again) to do his homework in the correct exercise book.
The problem is, our hero Ahmed, lives in the village of Koker, while his friend lives in another village (Pomphet?). What is more, when he tells his mother about this she doesn't see the urgency, and wants him to stay home and complete his homework (although, when he tries to do this, she keeps interrupting him with various demands, usually involving helping to settle the baby). Eventually he sneaks off under cover of getting bread. We then watch him trot up and down over at least two hills, through scenery (Northern Iran) that is both bucolic and alien,
into a town that could easily double for a fantastical Star Wars location, with its almost organic winding alleys (that sometimes have cows coming through them) and higgledy-piggledy steps. What Ahmed realizes very soon is that Pomphet is much larger than he expected (in fact, divided into named districts) and he has no idea where his friend lives.
He tries asking various adults and they are of varying degrees of uselessness
(the degree to which the adults, almost without exception, just don't listen to him is positively maddening), until he is informed that his friend, Mohamed Rema Nematzadeh, has departed just five minutes hence to Koker. "But I'm from there!" he says, baffled. Nonetheless, off he trots back to Koker. There he is waylaid by his Grandfather (who has the scariest teeth you've ever seen) who wants to know where he's been, and who has firm beliefs about training the young, in the pursuit of which he sends Ahmed to get cigarettes. We get an interlude (the vast majority of the film just follows our young hero, who is astonishing) where Grandfather discusses his views with a friend,
and we see a door salesman plying his trade with various people, until Ahmed (unsuccessful) returns, and becomes convinced that the door salesman is his friend's father (because his last name is Nematzadeh). But (in a running theme) the man, after taking a page from the friend's notebook (to Ahmed's horror) refuses to listen to Ahmed's questions and just sets off back to Pomphet on his donkey. So back again heads the indefatigable Ahmed. But, alas, it turns out that this is the wrong Nematzadeh. Some more wandering brings Ahmed to the home of an old carpenter, who claims to know everybody and have made all the doors that the door salesman is now busily replacing, as well as the crib that Ahmed's own father was rocked in. He promises to take Ahmed to the right house. He is, at last, an adult who actually listens, and they make a very charming pair (even if he does a lot more talking than listening, mostly about doors and windows). However, night is falling, and he moves very slowly...
Will Ahmed make it? Well, remember the heartwarming and the nervewracking?
This film is like a cool drink of water. Watch it when you've become too engrossed in the news, to remind yourself that the lives and concerns of children are universal, and it doesn't matter if you're growing up in what we would regard as extreme poverty in a newly-established theocratic state, the things that matter to you are understandable to anybody anywhere. The scenery is stunning, the snapshot of life in Northern Iran is fascinating, and the children (not just Ahmed but his friend, who cries real and heartbreaking tears) are both beautiful, with gigantic soulful eyes (and cute freckles) and wonderfully natural (everybody in the film is a non-actor). Lovely.
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