Baduk

Majid Majidi's first feature, set in south-eastern Iran on the Pakistani border. Two siblings, Jamal and Jamileh, are left with nobody after their father's death. A man takes them in. It soon becomes clear this is not a rescue but a sale. The sister is put into a carpet workshop; the boy joins a group of children smuggling goods across the border. The film's title comes from the name given to children who do that work. The narrative rests on Jamal's effort to find his sister. But the film does not tell it as an adventure; it shows how child labour is organised, who buys from whom, and how ordinary the arrangement has become. Location is one of the main materials: desert, border tracks, columns of children carrying loads. Most of the cast are not professionals and were chosen from the region. The child-centred storytelling of Majidi's later films begins here, but the register is far harder; the measure of hope in his later work is almost absent. An important starting point for anyone who likes Iranian cinema and social realist narrative. For anyone looking for comfortable viewing, the film takes the exploitation of children as its direct subject and softens it nowhere.