The elements of childhood innocence

Rating: 7/10 (17 February 2013)

How far will you go to get something you badly want? What happens if there is only a pair of shoes between you and your sibling, and your family is not well-off at all?
It begins with Ali (Amir Farrokh Hashemian) fetching his younger sister Zahra's (Bahare Seddiqi) pink shoes from a cobbler who had repaired them. While Ali gets some potatoes, a garbage man accidentally picked up the pair of shoes and took them away. Ali would knock over crates of vegetables while trying to get his younger sister's shoes and is chased away in the process.
With the financial situation of Ali's family, the landlord is arguing with Ali's mother (Fereshte Sarabandi) over being behind in paying the rent. As for the missing pair of shoes, the two began to devise a plan on what to do with it after Zahra had promised her brother not to tell their mother about it as they were doing their homework; while before that Ali's father (Reza Naji) had reprimanded Ali for not helping his ill mother when asked. The two siblings decided to share Ali's sneakers with Zahra wearing it in the morning to school before she returns it to her brother at midday so that he can wear it to class in the afternoon. This arrangement would see Ali being late for school three consecutive times with at the third time, the principal nearly wanted to send him away before Ali's teacher (Dariush Mokhtari) intervened.
Meanwhile once at the school's morning assembly, Zahra noticed her missing pair of pink shoes were on another student Roya's (Nafise Jafar-Mohammadi) feet. She would secretly follow Roya home and later brought her brother Ali along to try getting her shoes back, before both learned that Roya's father, who is actually the garbage man, is blind. Zahra would come to be very dismayed when her new friend Roya tell her that her father had threw away the pink shoes after Zahra noticed the new pair of purple shoes Roya was wearing as a result of doing well in her studies.
Ali and Zahra's father was anxious to earn extra money and decides to head for the rich suburbs of North Tehran to try his luck at being a gardener, with Ali accompanying his father. Not only that, Ali had learned in school of a long-distance footrace involving schools in the area and he noticed that the third prize is a one-week vacation camp and a pair of sneakers.
The beauty of this film is how the child actors played their parts, with their innocence shining through at various moments. The fear of simply not having a pair of shoe to wear, of Ali temporarily making up to his sister Zahra with the gold pen which he got after being in the top three in a class test, and especially personally for me, of where the siblings were blowing bubbles. Even despite the agony of losing a pair of shoes, such scenes still appear.
It may be something we take for granted in our daily lives, but Ali's determination of getting a pair of shoes for his sister after losing hers very early on is something to be admired, despite his age. It does remind us of what do we really treasure in our lives, and how despite the world we are living in, there are not many things in life which is as pure as childhood innocence as shown by the siblings in the film.