‘Children of Heaven’ - Review
During the pandemic when my parents and I were stuck in lockdown, I decided to rope them into my frequent cinephile activities. Watching title after title alone in my room got pretty old without a partner in crime, and my mom was on the chopping block. She’s your average immigrant Muslim mother, with an added distaste for most (if not all) celebrities and the “waste of time” that is movies and TV. She’ll watch Mrs. Doubtfire or The Lion King with us at home, but I’ve never seen her step foot in a movie theater. My love for and her disinterest in cinema was an obstacle I was determined to overcome, but finding a film we’d both enjoy proved to be a challenge.
Films would be vetoed based on various qualities, starting with the IMDB Parental Guidance score: no nudity, no kissing, no violence, no blasphemy, (preferably) no cursing. Then came my mother’s personal preferences: no fantasy, no science fiction (many times while watching Harry Potter with my siblings she’s questioned how we can enjoy something so far out of reach with reality.) Then I thought of the types of films she’d want to see, since I had no frame of reference. Something in Arabic? Something comedic? Based on a true story? A family film, a children’s film? I did my due diligence, searching and searching, until I stumbled upon a favorites list of a friend’s and noticed a film I had never heard of before.
Majid Majidi’s 1997 feature Children of Heaven follows brother and sister Ali and Zahra, grade schoolers in a poor neighborhood in Tehran. Ali loses his sister’s favorite (and only) pair of shoes, but with their unemployed father and their ailing mother to attend to, they decide not to burden them by telling. They concoct a plan to share Ali’s shoes: Zahra wears them to her morning school and switches with Ali when it’s time for him to head to class. This inciting incident takes us into vignettes of their daily lives at home, school and the city’s bustling streets, faced with hardships that are simple to some, but a world of difficulty to them.
The gentle-hearted story captured a magic my mother and I both fell in love with. It was strange how a film I had never seen before already felt nostalgic; we had discovered an instant classic. With nowhere to go for Eid that year, I geared it up, immersing myself in the ups and downs of the world’s most charming kids again. And the next holiday, I did the same. Children of Heaven in my mind was now associated with Eid; it had become an “Eid Movie.”
Then came the thought: what were the other Eid movies? Did there exist an official canon of films Muslims watched every year to celebrate their foremost holiday? Searching “Eid” on Letterboxd only brings up lists of American comedies, action and adventure films. Fine and dandy if your film of choice is Mad Max: Fury Road or Back to the Future, but that seems like you shuffled your favorite movie folder and hit play, not very Eid-themed at all. Then again, Children of Heaven doesn’t reference Eid or any holiday, so why am I defining it as an Eid movie in the first place?
We are all familiar with Christmas movies. Beyond the literal setting of a snowy December 25, feauring recurring characters like Santa and his reindeer, typical themes such as the importance of family, rediscovering your childhood innocence, believing in miracles, and loving where you came from and who you are, are present in movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34th Street, and Home Alone). Then there are films that aren’t about Christmas at all but still get air time during the season: The Lord of the Rings, Casablanca, The Sound of Music, Little Women. These comforting classics feature hallmarks of Christmas media—home, found family, redemption, snow—that capture the so-called “Christmas spirit.”
Holidays, generally, are the time when you reconnect with the traditions of your religion and culture. Iran is one of the few majority-Muslim nations to have a deep, well-documented and developed history with cinema, boasting world-renowned auteurs. The culture informs the art: all the women in this film wear hijab, Ali’s father cuts sugar cubes to serve with tea at the local mosque. Even the shops, schools, and clothing, reminded my mother of her youth in Libya decades ago. Everyday aspects of Muslim life is portrayed, not for pointed representation, but simply because they exist. It was a new and special experience watching a slower, thoughtful film that took place in a world so surprisingly familiar.
Similar to Christmas films, family films are an obvious Eid movie qualifier. A trademark of Iranian cinema is the child protagonist (Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s House?, Homework, Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, The Mirror, also films I discovered with my mother), deliberately so, to avoid government censorship, using wide-eyed innocence to highlight socio-political problems of the day. Children of Heaven is no anomaly, as is Majidi’s wider filmography (The Colour of Paradise, Baran), but I cannot justify putting it in the same boat as Panahi or Kiarostami’s work. While the children’s problems stem from the poverty into which they were born, the world around them is quite gentle. There is a lack of cynicism for the society at large; the trials and tribulations they face stem from accidents, or fateful happenstance.
Because of their predicament, Zahra is sometimes late when bringing Ali his sneakers before class. Despite running as fast as he can, he is tardy more than once; eventually, the principal catches him. He can’t explain the situation for fear of his parents finding out, so we watch helplessly as tears fall out of the boy’s big brown eyes. Majidi does an excellent job putting us in the perspective of these children that we fear the worst repercussions—I fully expected the principal to hit him, but he doesn’t. He tells him to go home and bring his father so they can all talk, and when Ali’s homeroom teacher vouches for him (he’s top of his class, after all), he lets it go.
These bits of kindness for our heroes are sprinkled throughout the story, whether it’s Ali’s teachers, Zahra’s classmates or a random street vendor. The siblings themselves, being so young but having to grow up so quickly, are good-natured and kind-hearted, to their parents, neighbors and each other. Kindness is an Islamic virtue, and since the average kid can easily see themselves in Ali or Zahra, they stand to learn from them when they make the right choice. At school, Zahra scans the sea of girls in the courtyard, checking their shoes, until she sees her old pink pair that Ali lost on a girl in another class. She follows her home, planning a confrontation, but backs down once she sees the girl with her blind father. Realizing they’re both victims of hapless circumstances, she decides against selfishness, a big move for a first grader.
This moment, and other moments in the film, echoed a verse from the Quran in my head: “But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you.” (2:216) Zahra would love to get her shoes back, but it is eventually better for her that they ended up with someone else; their father gets a good sum of money he dreams of saving, but ends up needing it for an emergency; it’s unfair that Ali has to dash to school every day, but his learned speed helps him enter the city-wide race for the movie’s climax. For their hardships, for their patience and growth, they are in the end rewarded—which reminds me of another often-quoted verse, “Verily, with hardship comes ease.” (94:5)
As a proper entry to the Eid movie canon, Children of Heaven effortlessly captures the “Eid spirit” while managing to be broadly appealing—it was nominated for an Oscar, after all. While I want more people to discover this film and hope it brings them a similar joy, I also want to encourage my fellow Muslim cinephiles to hunt for movies to add to the docket, ones that have universal messages, atmospheres we recognize and characters we see ourselves in. Ultimately, though, the film you choose to watch on that special day is relative to you. Mine just happened to be the wonderful little film I found for my mother that helped us share a feeling.