From my programme notes for the Cinema of Childhood season in the UK, April 2014.
Bag of Rice [Kiseye Berendj] Director: Mohammad Ali Talebi.
Iran, 1998. With Jairan Abadzade. 80 mins. Cert. U.
The moment that Jeyran, the unflagging young protagonist of
Bag of Rice,
sets out on her urban odyssey across south Tehran with her
partially-sighted neighbour Masoumeh Khanoom, two children – one of whom
is lugging a gas cylinder with difficulty– are seen walking towards the
camera. The scene takes place in a narrow, brick-walled alley; it is
representative of director Mohammad Ali Talebi’s film style and contains
the essence of his view of the lives of children in his home city. It
expresses the responsibilities, or rather the burdens, that their
circumstances demand they bear, and which force them to mature early in
their lives. Children in Talebi’s films, especially in
Bag of Rice, are not guided by adults, but rather
they are the guiding force through the unexpected surprises of everyday life, on journeys of self-determination.
This perspective on youth in Tehran is found not only in the cinema
of Talebi, but also in other films produced by the Institute for
Intellectual Education of Children and Young Adults – where Talebi and
numerous contemporaries, including Abbas Kiarostami, started out as
working directors. It is an outlook that owes much to the second
“author” of the film, screenwriter Houshang Moradi-Kermani, the leading
proponent of literature focusing on children and teenagers in Iran.
