Children of Heaven (1997)

The Pink Shoes

Ali picks up his little sister Zahra’s shoes from the cobbler. They’re pink, worn out and freshly mended, and they’re the only pair she has. On the way home, he stops at a greengrocer’s, sets the bag down for a moment, and a junk collector takes it away with the trash. The shoes are gone.

Ali’s family is poor. His father works odd jobs and is behind on the rent, his mother is ill and there’s a new baby. Ali knows his parents can’t afford new shoes, and he’s terrified of the trouble he’ll be in. So he and Zahra make a secret pact: they’ll share his sneakers. She wears them to school in the morning, runs home at midday, hands them over in an alley and Ali runs to his afternoon classes.

Majid Majidi made it in 1997, and it became the first Iranian film ever nominated for an Oscar in the foreign language category. The story is tiny. It feels enormous.

Two Children

Amir Farrokh Hashemian plays Ali, and Bahare Seddiqi plays Zahra, and neither was a professional actor. They’re both astonishing. Ali is serious, responsible, guilty and determined, a boy trying to carry a weight far too heavy for him. Zahra is sweet, stubborn and indignant, and she has every right to be: she’s the one wearing her brother’s too-big, filthy sneakers to school.

Their relationship carries the film. They bicker, sulk and argue in whispers so their parents won’t hear, passing notes in schoolbooks, and they love each other fiercely. When Ali gives Zahra a special pen he won at school, as an apology, it’s one of the sweetest gestures in the film. Majidi captures the way children negotiate, keep secrets and look after each other with complete sincerity.

The Running

Much of the film is running. Every day, Zahra races home from school, desperate not to make her brother late, and Ali sprints through the narrow alleys of south Tehran to reach his class before the bell, arriving breathless and sweaty. He’s late again and again, and the headmaster starts threatening to expel him.

These sequences are thrillingly tense. You find yourself holding your breath as a little girl runs through crowded streets in shoes too big for her, or a boy dodges traffic and puddles to beat a school bell. Majidi turns the most ordinary daily routine into a race against disaster, and it works because the stakes, to these children, are everything.

The Gutter

There’s a scene where one of the sneakers falls into a gutter and is swept away by the rushing water. Zahra chases it down the street, frantic, as it bobs away through the current, and a shopkeeper finally fishes it out with a stick. She sits on the curb and cries with relief.

The scene is about a shoe floating down a drain, and it’s more suspenseful than most car chases. That’s the magic of the film. By this point, you understand exactly what that shoe means, and you’re as frightened of losing it as she is.

Rich and Poor

Midway through, Ali goes with his father to the wealthy suburbs of north Tehran, where his father hopes to earn money as a gardener. The contrast is stark: huge villas, locked gates, intercoms and bored rich children. Ali ends up playing with a lonely boy in a mansion while his father tends the garden, and they earn more in an afternoon than the family has seen in weeks.

Majidi never lectures about class or poverty. He simply shows two worlds, a few miles apart, and lets the audience draw conclusions. Ali’s father dreams aloud, on the bicycle ride home, about everything they’ll be able to buy. Then the bicycle’s brakes fail, and the dream crashes into a wall.

Roya

Zahra discovers that a girl at her school, Roya, is wearing her lost pink shoes. She follows the girl home and finds out that Roya’s father is a blind peddler, as poor as her own family. Zahra and Ali watch, and they decide not to ask for the shoes back.

The moment is quietly devastating. Two children who desperately need something choose not to take it from somebody who needs it just as much. Majidi doesn’t underline it. The children simply walk away, and the audience is left to feel the weight of their decision.

The Race

Then Ali learns about a city-wide running race for schoolchildren. The third prize is a new pair of sneakers. He begs to be allowed to enter, and he trains by running, as he’s been running all film, through the streets. His plan is simple: come third, win the shoes and give them to Zahra.

The race is one of the most thrilling sequences in any film about childhood. Ali runs with everything he has, pushed, tripped and exhausted, counting the boys ahead of him, trying to hold third place. Majidi cuts between his face, his legs and the flashes of memory driving him on, Zahra’s disappointed face and her shoes in the gutter, and it’s almost unbearable.

Then Ali, pushing too hard, crosses the line in first place. Everybody cheers. His teacher lifts him up in triumph. And Ali, tears in his eyes, asks whether he came third. He’s won, and he’s lost.

The Goldfish

The ending is simple and perfect. Ali goes home with a trophy and no shoes. Zahra sees his face and understands. He sits by the little pool in the courtyard and puts his blistered, bleeding feet in the cool water, and goldfish gather around them, nibbling gently.

The film doesn’t show us whether things get better, though it hints they will: his father is on his way home with new shoes for both children. But the last image is Ali’s feet in the water, soothed by the fish, a tiny moment of grace for a boy who’s given everything. It’s one of the loveliest endings in cinema.

Iranian Cinema

Children of Heaven belongs to a remarkable tradition of Iranian films about children, alongside Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? and Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon. Working under strict censorship, Iranian filmmakers often turned to children’s stories because they could explore poverty, injustice and dignity without directly confronting the authorities.

The result is a body of work that’s among the most humane in world cinema. Majidi’s film is the most widely loved of them. Start there.

The Father

Mohammad Amir Naji plays the children’s father, and he’s a complicated figure: proud, stern, overworked and humiliated by his poverty. He breaks sugar for the local mosque and refuses to take any for his own family, because it isn’t his to take. He’s strict with Ali and quick to scold him, and he’s also, underneath, a man desperate to do right by his children.

The children’s fear of disappointing him drives the whole plot. They’d rather run themselves ragged than add one more burden to a father already stretched to breaking point. Naji makes him sympathetic without softening him, and his bicycle ride through the rich suburbs, dreaming of a better life, is quietly heartbreaking.

South Tehran

Majidi shot the film on location in the poor neighbourhoods of south Tehran, and the setting feels completely real: narrow brick alleys, crowded bazaars, open gutters, courtyards with tiny fish ponds and families living on top of each other. There’s no gloss and no pity. It’s simply where these children live.

That documentary texture makes the story more gripping. Every alley Ali runs down is a real alley, and every obstacle in his path, a cart, a puddle, a crowd, feels like something a real boy would have to dodge.

Any Complaints?

The pace is gentle, some of the scenes at school are repetitive, and the father’s storyline is a little sentimental. Some viewers will find the tiny stakes hard to engage with at first.

Give it ten minutes. By the time Zahra’s shoe goes down the gutter, you’ll be as invested as you’ve ever been in any film.

Craft Note

Feet in the Fish Pond

Children of Heaven is a 9: a tender, gripping and heartbreaking film about two poor children sharing a pair of shoes, with astonishing performances from two young non-actors, a race you’ll never forget and one of cinema’s loveliest final images. The film is tiny. It’s also huge.

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