A child's arm stretches out, as far as it can, to pour water from a cup onto a scruffy potted plant. This, the first image in Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple, introduces with poetic clarity the film's strange, true story: of 12-year-old twin girls imprisoned by their father in their Tehran home, away from sunlight, from the friendship of other kids, from the smallest ecstasies and exasperations of childhood. This wise, poignant film was made under unusual circumstances. The father and the girls were persuaded to play themselves, and Makhmalbaf was only 17 when she shot it. But extraordinary Iranian films have been almost...ordinary. Savvy cinephiles know that Iran is the place where movie miracles happen all the time.
Iran is today's one great national cinema. Not since the Czech New Wave of the mid-'60s has a country made such a lovely noise at the big festivals and in Western capitals where the term foreign film doesn't evoke a yawn. Directors Abbas Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry), Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon) and Samira's father Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh) are as revered in the world film community as they are anonymous at American 'plexes.
To most Americans, the Islamic Republic of Iran is known for denouncing the Great Satan U.S., swearing out fatwas on any renegade soul and defining women's rights as the privilege of wearing a chador. For two decades, Iran has been, notoriously, fascism with a cleric's face. So it is a conundrum and a wonder that the republic has allowed the production of highly sophisticated films that are both touching, in the style of Italian postwar neorealism, and at least implicitly critical of aspects of the ruling theocracy. How do Iran's auteurs pull off this double feat? Frequently, by cloaking grownup stories in toddler raiment. For Iran is not only a leader in world film; it is the leader in children's films. This is Iran's cinema spirit: humanism with a kid's face.
Children's films--by which is meant movies about the young but not necessarily for them--have an honorable pedigree in Iran. The Shahrina sponsored a children's film festival for a dozen or so years before her husband was overthrown in 1979. Under the Ayatullah, as in the Pahlavi regime, Iranian films proved a valuable cultural export. Last month Majid Majidi's Children of Heaven became the first Iranian movie nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign film.
Children's stories are often tales of desperate travels through far-off lands. In Iranian films, the terrain is typically the child's own hometown. And the potential tragedy can be as simple as being left alone at school, as in Panahi's deliciously devious The Mirror. Or, as in Children of Heaven, the loss of your sister's shoes.