Sun Children: A 'lost boy' digs for treasure under the mean streets of Tehran in an Iranian spin on Dickens
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus
Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema is often about the struggles of children. And, for three decades, Majid Majidi has been one of the most successful directors of the genre with such films as the Oscar-nominated Children of Heaven (1997), The Colour of Paradise (1999) and Baran (2001).
He’s more willing to tug on heartstrings than some of his more austere compatriots, Like Charles Dickens, he’ll match a sentimental hook with a social critique of the abuse of the young.
Rouhollah Zamani seeks subterranean riches in Majid Majidi’s Sun Children
Though more bluntly effective than poetically transporting, Sun Children, carries on his crusade.
The obvious source of Sun Children is Oliver Twist, Dickens’ novel of child labour abuses in 1830s London, transplanted to contemporary Tehran (Mehdi dedicates the film to the “152-million forced into child labour” in the world).
Majidi unveils his story through the perspective of 12-year-old Ali (Roohollah Zamani), a sturdy freckle-faced ruffian with an innocent gaze. (At last year’s Venice International Film Festival, Zamani won the Marcello Mastroianni award for an emerging actor.)
Here Zamani plays the Iranian equivalent of Dickens’ Artful Dodger, the child foreman who oversees a gang of three other boys, Reza (Mani Ghafouri), Mamad (Mohammad Mahdi Mousavifar) and young Afghan refugee, Abolfazi (Abolfazl Shirzad).
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We first meet them during one of their operations, boosting tires from expensive cars parked beneath a luxurious Tehran shopping mall. Ali works for Heshem (Ali Nassirian), the Fagin of this story, a crime boss in a stained vest who runs his operation from a rooftop office, surrounded by his caged pet pigeons.
As Ali goes to grovel before the boss for having screwed up the tire operation, Heshem unexpectedly begins behaving kindly. He gives the kid food and then offers him a special job: He wants Ali and his friends to enroll at a local charity school, the Sun School, which tries to educate street kids.
Perhaps, says Heshem, he can even arrange for Ali to find a room for his mother, who is tied to a bed in a catatonic state in a mental hospital after her home and most of her family were destroyed in a fire.
Heshem isn’t actually concerned about the boys’ educations. The basement of the school leads through a maintenance tunnel to a local graveyard, where, claims Heshem, there’s a hidden treasure. He wants the boys to dig a tunnel from the school to recover the prize.
Ali and his friends manage to enroll, and between classes and after hours, Ali manages to slip away often enough to discover a storage space and a door to the underground tunnel leading from the school’s foundations. Armed with a pick-axe and a drill, he hacks his way through concrete and dirt, amid threatening roof collapse and thick mud.
As the boys are forced to conform to the rules of the school, they are gradually changed. The idealistic vice principal, Mr. Refie (Javad Ezati) teaches the boys how to co-exist without violence and find joy in knowledge.
Loyalties shift, and the director stacks up one crisis on top of the other: One of Ali’s gang, Afghan refugee kid, Abolfazi, is about to be deported back to Afghanistan along with his sister, Zahra (Shamila Shirzad), with whom Ali has a puppy romance. Zahra makes her living selling trinkets to women on the Tehran subway, while living in a rat warren of a refugee tenement. The school is desperately short of funding and about to be closed for failure to pay back rent. Could the treasure save the school? Get real: This is an Iranian children’s film, not a Disney one, though neither is narrative plausibility.
What looks like a tale worthy of a Tom Sawyer adventure is essentially an allegory of Ali’s two choices: Studying and preparing for his future in a classroom, or tunneling in the dirt toward the graveyard.
The plot is a pretext, a public service announcement for the importance of education, and, memorably, a series of portraits of the day-to-day lives of children clinging on the edge of survival.
Sun Children. Directed by Majid Majidi. Written by Majid Majidi and Niva Javidi. Starring Ali Nasirian, Javad Ezzati, Roohollah Zamani, Seyed Mohammad Mehdi Mousavi Fard, Shamila Shirzad, Abolfazi Shirzad, Mani Ghafouri, Safar Mohammadi, Ali Ghabeshi. Sun Children is available on VOD on Friday, June 25.