The Father

'I know of no other world than a child's world,' director Majid Majidi has said. 'A small and simple world, yet vast and magnificent. Blue like the sky, clear like the river, and upright like the mountains.' This statement captures Majidi's style: its child-like directness sidesteps naivety to achieve singular emotional clarity. Following the death of his father, a 14-year-old Iranian boy, Mehrollah (Sadeghi), travels south to find work, returning later to find that the local policeman is now a domineering presence in his mother's house. Fleeing from his occupied home, he's pursued and caught by his new father, but the journey back is longer and harder than either of them could have imagined.