Detailed Film Analysis of 'Children of Heaven' - Alexander College

This essay provides a detailed film analysis of Majid Majidi's 'Children of Heaven,' focusing on its themes of family, sensitivity, moral obligations, and resource scarcity within the context of Iranian cinema. The analysis explores how the film portrays the lives of two children who must share a single pair of shoes after a mishap, highlighting their resilience and the film's reflection of Iranian life and customs. The essay also discusses the historical and political influences on Iranian cinema post-revolution, including censorship and the rise of filmmakers who navigated these constraints by focusing on children's stories and universal themes. The film's use of a child's perspective to circumvent government controls and its portrayal of both the hardships and sweetness of life in Iran are examined, with references to the film's visual storytelling and its broader cultural impact. The essay concludes by noting the film's success in providing a nuanced view of Iranian society, balancing moments of hardship with heartwarming depictions of family and community.

Running head: THE CHILDREN OF HEAVEN
THE CHILDREN OF HEAVEN
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note:

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The Iranian revolution significantly influenced Iranian articulations. Motion pictures
came to be viewed as aftereffects of the West and in this manner were precluded, and various
execution focuses were scorched to the ground1. Progressively, in the mid 1980s, film age began
again, anyway there was considerable limitation constrained on both creation and show. Various
motion picture makers left the country repelled abroad yet continued conveying films for the
Iranian Diaspora. In Iran, confinement rules took after strict Islamic traditions, which asked for
the disallowing of women onscreen and behind the camera. Love, which had been a fundamental
subject in Iranian silver screen before the revolution, would never again be depicted in movies
after the introduction in 1983 of Islamic principles for makers2. A while later, when
confinements were imperceptibly loosened and women were allowed back onto the screen in
1987, there was all the while overpowering control; for example, on-screen characters of reverse
sexual orientations were not allowed to contact each unique with the exception of on the off
chance that they were associated, everything considered. Around this time women film makers
began to rise, including Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Kharej az mahdudeh 1987, and Puran
Derakhshandeh, 1951 Paraneh kuchak khoshbakhti (Little Bird of Happiness, 1988)3. In 1987 the
Farabi Cinema Foundation was developed to ensure that films being made were of a high gauge
and not pushed just by advantage.
Most motion pictures of this time were financed by the organization, anyway once made,
they every now and again were denied from screening in Iran. To the extent style and point,
1 Zahedi, Dariush. The Iranian revolution then and now: Indicators of regime instability. Routledge, 2018.
2 Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz. Foucault in Iran: Islamic revolution after the Enlightenment. University of Minnesota
Press, 2016.
3 Blizek, William L., and Bilal Yorulmaz. "Applying Religion and Film to Islam." Global Journal of Human-Social
Science Research (2015).

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various boss took their lead from European silver screens and improvements, particularly Italian
neorealism. This is evident in such motion pictures as Kelid (“The Key , Ebrahim Forouzesh,
1987”) and The White Balloon . Social investigation, brought into the field in the midst of the
New Wave, continued after the revolution, and tremendous quantities of the motion pictures that
were not restricted spun around stories of the revolution covered as big business stories, for
instance, Nun va Goldoon (“A Moment of Innocence, 1996”). These motion pictures, in
perspective of neighborhood people encountering conditions not of their own having, tread a rare
effect among account and fiction4. On account of spending goals, a lion's offer of these motion
pictures were shot on zone.
Various film makers had confined the shah in the midst of Iran's revolution, assuming
that if his organization were toppled they would be without offered run to convey the motion
pictures they required, and not by any means just for advantage, but instead the new,
authoritative government took away equipment, film stock, and resources from motion picture
makers to control filmic depictions of Iranian culture5. Each film's outline, screenplay, cast, and
gathering, and the completed film, all must be supported by the oversight board if the film is to
be made and shown in Iran. In spite of the way that the Islamic government began a
methodology of Islamization of art of the human involvement in 1979, makers and diverse
experts have made sense of how to free themselves from the necessities of specialist conviction
framework6. One way by which specialists made sense of how to do this was by moving out of
4 Blizek, William L., and Bilal Yorulmaz. "Applying Religion and Film to Islam." Global Journal of Human-Social
Science Research (2015).
5 Daneshvar, Parviz. Revolution in Iran. Springer, 2016.
6 Blizek, William L., and Bilal Yorulmaz. "Applying Religion and Film to Islam." Global Journal of Human-Social
Science Research (2015).

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Iran and making diasporic films. Others based their films around youths and experience stories
with generous undertones of valor and liberal principles. There was an absence of film theaters in
the country in light of the devouring of silver screens in the midst of the revolution, while
various that still existed were in unpleasant condition. With the organization in the red and with
the United States– drove boycott of Iran, the revamping and repair of film theaters was low on
the organization's once-over of requirements. Regardless, after some time, theaters were altered
and repaired. There are various film theaters in the considerable towns and urban networks in
Iran, anyway moderately few in commonplace regions.
“Children of Heaven” is a modern Iranian cinema about families, sensitivity, moral
obligations and issues of confined resources. This film, shot in and around Tehran, takes after the
lives of two families who are constrained to share one arrangements of shoes after a horrendous
incident7. Not wanting to stack their doing combating gatekeepers, the children must coordinate
and find a response for deal with this basic incident. The film exhibits the interior quality we
have when looked with adversity. The film is about a child who loses his sister's shoes. He takes
them to the shoemaker for repairs, and in travel home, when he stops to get vegetables for his
mother, an outwardly debilitated garbage specialist incidentally occupies them. Clearly, the
child, named Ali, is reluctant to tell his people. Clearly, his sister, named Zahra, has to know
how she ought to go to class without shoes. The children fervently notes to each other,
straightforwardly under their parent's noses. Majid Majidi's film has a radiant scene where Ali
and his father bicycle from the generally medieval streets and back boulevards of the old town to
the raised structures and luxury homes where the rich people live. The father looks for after work
as a grower, yet he is frightened by the trial of talking into the radios on the entryways of the
7 Majidi, Majid, Amir Esfandiari, Mohammad Esfandiari, Mohammad Amir Naji, Amir Farrokh Hashemian, and
Bahare Seddiqi. Children of heaven. Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, 1998.

4THE CHILDREN OF HEAVEN
rich. His kid bounces in, with offers of pruning, weeding, showering and trimming. It is a
magnificent triumph. Events in the film are seen through the children's authentic eyes, as is so
often and adroitly the case in Iranian motion pictures. A child's-eye see is, notwithstanding
different things, strong in circumventing Government controls. The events are portrayed and
experienced by the children’s eyes. But in the more real, less manipulative motion pictures that
this one takes after - especially the smooth work of Jafar Panahi (“The White Balloon, The
Mirror'”) what the energetic characters watch is committed to be more astounding than it is here.
In ''Children of Heaven,'' life is sweet disregarding countless hardships, and no reality
past the fiscal jumps in on a tale atmosphere8. Simply through ungainly emphasis does the
mission for new shoes go up against any more conspicuous importance.
In “Children of Heaven”, life in Iran is accounted for in standard detail, from the less
appealing food available to Ali's family to the way a woolen bit of garments is carefully
unraveled so it can be sewn into something else. Crushing out a living is especially serious for a
gathering of Turkish reason living in the southern bit of the city, a zone suitably separated from a
well-off an area in the north. “Children of Heaven” gives a liberal, enveloping sentiment of
Iranian life and customs, from the way the family designs “sugar cubes” to be served at a mosque
to the way Zahra helps watch over elderly neighbors. These minutes come more successfully to
Mr. Majidi than his studiously blended culmination for what is, paying little heed to its surface
dismalness, a fundamentally splendid story.
8 Gregory, Annie. "Majid Majidi and New Iranian Cinema." Journal of Religion & Film 12, no. 1 (2016): 4.

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Reference:
Blizek, William L., and Bilal Yorulmaz. "Applying Religion and Film to Islam." Global Journal
of Human-Social Science Research (2015).
Daneshvar, Parviz. Revolution in Iran. Springer, 2016.
Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz. Foucault in Iran: Islamic revolution after the Enlightenment.
University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Gregory, Annie. "Majid Majidi and New Iranian Cinema." Journal of Religion & Film 12, no. 1
(2016): 4.
Majidi, Majid, Amir Esfandiari, Mohammad Esfandiari, Mohammad Amir Naji, Amir Farrokh
Hashemian, and Bahare Seddiqi. Children of heaven. Institute for the Intellectual Development
of Children and Young Adults, 1998.
Zahedi, Dariush. The Iranian revolution then and now: Indicators of regime instability.
Routledge, 2018.