# Bacheha-Ye aseman (1997)

### reviewed by
Akiva Gottlieb

Please post the following review to the newsgroup.

    Children Of Heaven ***1/2

rated PG in Persian with English subtitles starring Mohammad Amir Naji, Fereshte Sarabandi, Karnal Mirkarimi written and directed by Majid Majidi

Once in a very long while, a film comes along that doesn't need an epic story in order to grasp the viewer and tell a simple story in an epic way. Majid Majidi's CHILDREN OF HEAVEN is such a film. Over the years, Iranian directors have shown skill in telling a simple but subtle BICYCLE THIEFesque story. The reason for this is that in a country like Iran, where there is no freedom of speech, you cannot degrade the country in any way, especially on film. So the filmmakers had to be able to express art with subtlety, as to not generate controversy.

CHILDREN OF HEAVEN tells the story of a small, impoverished Iranian boy who goes to the marketplace and gets his sister's shoes stolen by accident. The boy promises his sister that she will get the shoes back, as long as she doesn't tell their parents. The children must then share one pair of sneakers, to be traded back and forth between the time they go to school(she goes in the morning, while he goes in the afternoon). The children try some clever schemes in order to get the shoes back, but none of them seem to work. That is really the film's entire plot, but it moves rather swiftly and never becomes dull(in Iran, it was a huge hit among children). But during the film, if you pay close attention, you can tell that Majidi is actually crafting a brilliant study on the different wealth classes of Iran. In short, CHILDREN OF HEAVEN deserves it's Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film just as much or even more than any of the other nominees, and it makes you wish that Miramax spent just as much money promoting this film as it did LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL or SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.

    review by the Teenage Movie Critic
    akiva@excite.com
    www.angelfire.com/mo/film

Get your free, private email at http://mail.excite.com/

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews