Iranian director Majid Majidi has made some of the most visually stunning and emotionally stirring films in world cinema about the plight of under-privileged, exploited and abused young people, and is one of his very best. The story of street boys commissioned by a local boss to dig for a treasure unfolds around an urban schoolyard and the clever, freckled face of 12-year-old Ali , a stereotype-buster of non-stop courage.
Post-revolutionary Iranian films have often drawn from the well of children’s problems to outflank the censors and score their social critiques. The screenplay written by Majidi and co-scripter Nima Javidi pins its outrage to a swift-moving, high-stakes plot that undercuts sentimentality and the conventions of the exploited-child genre.
Instead of a beating, Ali is instructed to take his boys and enroll in the Sun School, a charitable institution for working kids whose teachers hope to get them off the streets and send the most talented ones on to high school or a football club. The school is so poor and under-funded, Ali has to plead and fight to get them in.
Ali, whose mobile face is lined with a permanent worried expression, is concerned about Zahra but also about his mother, who has been committed to a psychiatric institution after a severe trauma. His desire to get her out of the hospital motivates his desperate work. His brief is to find an underground tunnel that leads under the cemetery next door, where he is to look for a lost but unspecified treasure.
These action scenes are filmed like a classic prison-break movie, and the excitement and danger mount as the boys excavate a long narrow tunnel that only they can fit into. Never giving in to exhaustion or defeat, Ali cleverly overcomes the obstacles that arise underground, even borrowing an electric drill from the boss to push through rock and mortar until the ceiling starts shaking. When he finally breaks through to an underground waterway, he sees his goal within reach.
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