听 User Rating 
Although the story is fictional, the essence is factual. Bahman Ghobadi (an Iranian-Kurdish film maker) communicates the reality of exploited children forced to smuggle goods (small-potato stuff like tyres) from Iran to Iraq just to make a few pence. To up the emotional impact, the director binds in the story of a very sick boy whose brother has been struggling to scratch together enough money to send him to Iraq for an operation. The boy is, in real life, terminally ill.
So deeply does Ghobadi feel for his own culture (he had to support his own family from the age of 11) that he proves expert in selecting images which reflect its harshness, including a brief, dramatic shot of the children scaling a mountain, the understandable bluntness of the sister鈥檚 mother-in-law when refusing to take on the sick boy, and the boy himself packed into a saddle on the side of a horse. A complete absence of sentiment is a real plus. The children, who clearly live this kind of brutal, unforgiving life, also help the film no end with their unaffected, open, absolutely true performances. There is not an actor among them.
In Iranian with English subtitles.
