The Traveler

Twelve-year-old Qassem in Malayer wants one thing: to get to a football match in Tehran. To raise the fare and the ticket he steals from his mother, tells his friends he will photograph them and poses them in front of a camera with no film, and collects the money. He reaches Tehran, pays a scalper an inflated price and gets into the stadium. Then he falls asleep before kick-off and misses all of it. It is Abbas Kiarostami's first feature. It runs 71 minutes, in Persian, made for Kanoon. What the film watches is the boy himself: Qassem lies and steals to get where he wants and is indifferent to what his actions do to other people, including those closest to him. Kiarostami neither makes him charming nor punishes him. It also works as a record of daily life in Iran in the early seventies: the school, the provincial town, the bus terminal and the streets around the stadium. Who it is for: viewers who want to see where Kiarostami began and who like films that keep their distance from childhood. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a moral. The film does not judge Qassem, and the last scene is not a punishment but simply what happened.