99 min | NR | June 25, 2021 | Strand Releasing
A boy works the streets of Tehran to keep his family alive. A criminal sends him to a charity school for poor kids, not to learn but to dig for buried treasure beneath it. The treasure is the lie. The kids are the gold no one wants to count.
Ali is twelve years old and already a working man. He hustles in the back alleys of Tehran, runs errands for a local crime boss, and supports a family that the state has abandoned. A gangster offers him a way out of the bottom. Beneath the Sun School, a charity that takes in street kids and child laborers, there is supposedly a fortune buried in a tunnel. Ali enrolls, not to study, but to tunnel through the floor to reach it. The film is about the cruelty of asking children to be the only adults in the room.
Roohollah Zamani plays Ali with a hardness that never softens into cuteness. He carries the wary calculation of a kid who has learned that every kindness has a price. Ali Nasirian plays Hashem, the man who pulls Ali’s strings, with the calm of someone who never has to raise his voice. Javad Ezzati plays Vice-Principal Rafie, the teacher who sees what Ali is and tries to reach him anyway, and the two actors build a relationship that neither one fully trusts. Shamila Shirzad plays Zahra, an Afghan girl selling trinkets on the subway, and her scenes locate the film’s largest fear. The kids who fall through the cracks are not metaphors. They are real and they are everywhere.
Majid Majidi directs from a script he wrote with Nima Javidi, and he stages the tunnel sequences as physical labor that grinds the body down. The camera goes underground with Ali into a cramped, airless dark where the digging never produces what it promises. Majidi shoots the school in warm light and the tunnel in suffocating brown, and the contrast makes the betrayal visible before a word is spoken. The sound design pushes the scrape of the shovel and the drip of water until the work feels like a sentence being served. The film keeps cutting back to the surface, where other children study and play, and the gap between the two spaces is the whole argument.
This is a film about a system that produces poor children and then asks them to save themselves. Ali wants the money to fix his family, and the school wants to fix Ali, and neither institution can offer what the other needs. Majidi refuses to let the charity off the hook even as he honors the people inside it. The ending arrives without sentiment and without rescue. It leaves Ali exactly where the world has always left him, holding on by his fingertips.