The White Balloon

Jafar Panahi's first film, from a script by Abbas Kiarostami. Seven-year-old Razieh wants a goldfish for the new year. She just about persuades her mother, takes five hundred toman and sets off for the shop. She loses the money on the way. The rest of the film is the effort to get it back: snake charmers, a grating outside a closed shop, adults who try to help and have to get back to work. It proceeds in real time, across the last ninety minutes before the Iranian new year. The idea is to hold a child's point of view honestly: the camera is mostly at a child's height and the adults' problems stay in the background. For a child a banknote can be the most important matter in the world, and the film does not condescend to that. Aida Mohammadkhani plays Razieh. It won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 1995 and is counted among the important steps in Iranian cinema's international emergence in that decade. The right place to start for anyone interested in Iranian cinema and plain narratives built through children. For a viewer wanting incident it is extremely small in scale; the entire matter is a child's lost money.