Children of Heaven

One can see why this was the first Iranian title to be Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Film. The story of two children and a pair of lost shoes leans heavily on plaintive looks and big brown eyes. In a Teheran greengrocer's, a blind rag-and-bone man accidentally makes off with the trainers that nine-year-old Ali has left unattended. The shoes belong to the boy's sister, but when Ali gets home the children agree not to mention the loss to their hard-up dad. Instead, they take it in turns to wear Ali's shoes, an arrangement destined to cause complications. All this promises the sort of junior-quest narrative familiar from Kiarostami's classic Where Is My Friend's House?, but the task of recovering the trainers becomes secondary to the notion of weighing material possessions against spiritual worth. The film's storytelling is appealing, but you can't help feeling that the adults are too good to be true, the onrush of tears rather conveniently deployed to ease potential crises.