O Pai

Thank you for the wonderful movie, Iranian cinema.I love Majidi and I don't care about imperfections..Its perfection is in the way the story is so simple that every movement,every word is gigantic, it echoes and leaves a print in the mind. Cinematography is so vivid, though I think the colors come from emotions, not the colors themselves. It is quiet movie, the silence broken by outbursts..Its a movie of contrasts , of love and hate..but going back to love ultimately. I cry a lot when watching Majidi's movies ...and I feel angry about him making them so heavy, almost impossible to watch at times because you get so wrapped up with characters' life situation, but then the end wouldn't crush upon with such a power and symbolism if it wasn't like that..I cry but then want to stay with the characters a lot more than the movie allows.Contrasts.Majidi is Van Ghog in cinema.Taking normal life situations and coloring them with colors, very dark and very bright. With lots of tenderness and kids' innocence.

Majid majidi is one among the favourite directors across the globe known for his natural simplicity & expressing the human emotions as realistic as possible...

The film explores a father-son relationship, emotional bonding in distress which reminds us that world is so large yet so small if you pick the right emotion...

The perfection is in the way the story is so simple that every movement,every word is gigantic, it echoes and leaves a impression in the mind,whileCinematography is so vivid unravels the various forms of human emotions and its necessity making the human a typical social beast who can't survive on his own...

Overall a must watch movie that falls under a category to watch out before every individual's lifetime...

Directed by Majid Majidi, who would later helm the better known Children of Heaven, this Iranian film is set in a working class milieu, and it tells the story of a teenage boy, who after his father is killed in a traffic accident, has to leave school and start working in order to support his family. He is proud of being, at such a young age, the person bringing the bread to his poor family. But things change when his widowed mother marries a police officer. He regards this as a double betrayal, and he tries to make life for his family impossible. After putting his two young sisters in jeopardy (in a domestic oven, in one of the film's best scenes), he flees to a port city. The policeman follows him, and in the road back they found themselves in the desert, in a final chase scene that is among the best thing I ever saw. Eventually, and in extremis, adoptive father and son reconciles. Perhaps the best thing of the movie is the portrayal of the policeman. His manners are a bit rough and unpolished, but in his heart he is a good man; it would have been much easier for the film to portray him as a monster, but happily this was avoided. Another triumph for the humanistic Iranian cinema that surprised the movie-watching world in the 1990s (and which sadly, right now, seems to be going through a bad time, hurt by renewed censorship in the Islamic republic).

Pedar (The Father) by Majid Majidhi. An Iranian film. Like most of the Iranian films the story is simple but told with artistic touches. The adolescent son working for his family comes back and finds that his widowed mother remarried a policeman. She explains that she had to marry again for social security. But the boy who loved his father before the accident could not stomach a step father. With all Hamletian fury he hates his step father without finding out what sort of a person the step father is. He runs away and the stepfather searches for him and finds him. On their return journey they have to undergo hardships while traversing the desert and empathy builds up between them. Majidhi's touches are there in many scenes. The accident which killed the boys father was just shown with the scene of the accident. He also knows when to stop the narrative. The boy and the stepfather lie dehydrated over a stream,. The photograph of the stepfather with his mother and sisters drifts from the pocket of the stepfather and stops at the nose of the boy indicating reconciliation and the boy's discovery of a new father. And then the film ends. The best acting is by the mother - the anguish and suffering of a poor woman (whatever the culture they live in) who is torn between the love to the son and love to the man who kindly gave security to her in a traditional society and jas neem a good father to her children.

Of course I think Majidhi's other film "the children of heaven" is much better film – the story of how a bother and sister of a poor family share a pair of shoes between themselves.

The period when the West did not literally plunder the Middle East countries. The period in which original art was made comfortably in the Middle East. A movie that proves that a cliché story can turn into diamonds in the hands of a master. And Majid Majidi.