Children of Heaven, from Iranian director Majid Majidi, immerses us so thoroughly in the world of its child protagonists that their central dilemma – trading a single pair of shoes back and forth so that their parents don’t realize they’ve lost their only other pair – has a powerhouse dramatic intensity. When they meet mid-day in an alley to hand off the shoes – the younger sister running from her morning class, the 9-year-old brother craning his neck as he waits, hoping she’ll come in time for him to make it to his afternoon class – it feels as if the fate of the world hangs in the balance. As such, a sequence in which the sister (Bahare Seddiqi) drops one shoe in a flowing street gutter and frantically tries to retrieve it has all the intensity of a Hollywood action sequence. Later, when the brother (Amir Farrokh Hashemian) enters a race in which a new pair of shoes is the prize, he might as well be participating in the Olympics. Children of Heaven is a simple film – it has bold, childlike colors and a narrative that turns on unremarkable, everyday events – yet Majidi and his young actors invest it with such basic truth about the inner lives of children that the movie feels as big as the universe.
