A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.
Zohre's shoes are gone; her older brother Ali lost them. They are poor, there are no shoes for Zohre until they come up with an idea: they will share one pair of shoes. School awaits.
An 8 year old boy must return his friend's notebook he took by mistake, lest his friend be punished by expulsion from school.
After the earthquake of Guilan, a film director and his son travel to the devastated area to search for the actors from the movie the director made there a few years previously. In their search, they see how people who have lost everything in the earthquake still have hope and try to live life to the fullest.
This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
Young male students at a local Iranian school are asked about their feelings on homework.
A young orphan named Amiro lives alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan. He survives by shining shoes, selling water, and collecting deposit bottles. Although he sometimes finds himself at odds with both adults and competing older kids, he finds solace in dreams about departing cargo ships and airplanes—and by running.
During the Iran-Iraq War, Bashu, a young boy loses his house and all his family. Scared, he sneaks into a truck that is leaving the area. He gets off the truck in the Northern part of the country, where everything from landscape to language is different. He meets Naii, who is trying to raise her two young children on a farm, while her husband is away. Despite cultural differences, and the fact that they do not speak the same language, Bashu and Naii slowly form a strong bond.
Returning from an errand to buy bread, a boy finds a menacing dog blocking his way through the alley he must go down to get home. Frightened by the dog's barking, he asks various passers-by for help but no-one pays him any attention, and he must find a solution all by himself: he throws the dog a piece of bread and, while the animal is devouring it, he continues on his way home.
Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral 10-year-old boy in a small Iranian town wishes to see the Iran national football team play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors.
First Case, Second Case is a documentary about a teacher who sends a group of pupils out of the classroom when one of them does not own up to talking behind the master's back.
An old man with a hearing aid tires of listening to the noises of the town. But when he takes his aid out he can't hear his grandchildren coming to see him.
A boy on his way home from school kicks a ball out of a street where some children are playing. He's chased and forced to take a new way home.
During breaktime, Dara and Nader have a fierce argument about a torn exercise book that the former has given back to the latter. There are two possible outcomes, which the film shows one after the other. One is that Dara wants to get his own back, and the two boys start a violent fight; the other is that they work together to mend the exercise book with a little glue.
A woman orders a suit from a tailor for her young son to wear to her sister's wedding. The tailor's apprentice, together with two other teenage boys who work in the same building, devise a plan to try on the suit at night to see what it feels like.
Set on the southern coast of Iran, "Harmonica" begins as a young boy receives a musical present from abroad. Fascinated and envious, his friends make him the leader of the pack, as they compete for the privilege of holding the harmonica or even blowing a few notes, until the games and horseplay begin to take on a sinister edge.
The hard daily life of a kid working in a photo shop while trying to get closer to the girl he likes.
The story is about two poor boys’ search for their father through a Journey from downtown to uptown. Two hungry boys are forced to move through the events, people and unrealistic and risky places in a nightmarish way. A daily journey in search of their lost identity and worth!
"A humorous slice of educational instruction on refurbishing and painting" (MoMA).
A sense of order is the necessary basis of any good social organisation. To illustrate this axiom, Kiarostami presents a series of paired scenes in this educational short film in which the same action is first shown in an organised way and then in an anarchic one. The film crew, however, finds it difficult to organise disorder.
