Several top movie reviews have already talked about the image of children very well. Let me talk about the image of adults in the movie.
Amer's mother almost bears the brunt of the adults' indifference and disregard for children. Amer tried to tell his mother over and over again: I am not going to play, I just want to return the workbook to my classmates, otherwise he will be punished. But my mother was almost completely oblivious to it and kept repeating, you have to do your homework first. And she herself was so irritated by the repetition that every repetition that followed increased her anger. But the mother is indeed very busy. As a traditional Iranian woman, the mother rushes non-stop between housework and taking care of her young son. In a few shots, the mother's work has not stopped. As a small labor force at home, Amer was also given the responsibility of doing part of the housework. Although his mother kept urging him to do his homework, every time he started to write, his mother came to ask him to help with housework, sometimes to get a baby bottle for his brother, and sometimes to pick up clothes. This phenomenon is very common in movies. Among Amer's classmates, there are examples of people who were unable to complete their homework because they were doing farm work. When Amer went to the village across the mountain, there were also many children helping their parents with the farm work. This should have been a very common practice in rural Iran at the time. Young children are often treated as an immature workforce rather than a child in need of growth.
Another image is the old man in the movie. The first is a pedantic, uneducated person like Grandpa Amer. When he first returned to the village, his grandfather asked Amer to look for cigarettes even though his mother was clearly carrying cigarettes with him. Even if his mother helped to find cigarettes, Amer would be reprimanded for not finding cigarettes in person. Grandpa said this to make Amer learn to obey the words of his elders, and then he brought out an irrelevant story of road construction to prove his truth. It's like a weak person who has been bullied by life, and after pondering an illogical law in life, he forcibly instilled it into another weaker object. Grandpa groaned angrily when facing Amer, but when he encountered the doorman who repaired the iron gate and forcibly took away Amer's book, he could only say nothing. He instilled the so-called "discipline" in Amer, but how can such a discipline empower you? Amer's grandmother should also belong to the same kind. After seeing the poor communication between Amer and her mother, the grandmother, as an elder, did not seem to play a role in promoting communication at all, but continued to emphasize to Amer that "you have to change your shoes when you go upstairs." Grandma is too old. Like the patient's grandma, she doesn't want to get involved in any conflicts and disputes. She just wants to keep her own little place and maintain the most superficial rules.
Another kind of old man is kind and chatty like an old man with a wooden door. The old man is one of the few people in the movie who listens to Amer well and helps Amer. The old man had bad legs and could not catch up with little Amer, so he took Amer slowly to his classmate's house. In the shot, the two walk from evening to night. The shadows of the windows and glass reflected on the wall tell the old man's past achievements and his loneliness today - the young people have replaced the iron door. It is said that the iron door can last a lifetime, but Go ask, which of those wooden doors is broken? The old man of the wooden door does not have those indifferences, but he has his loneliness. When the kind-hearted Amer found that the place the old man brought him was not a real classmate's house, in order not to spoil the old man's pleasure, he quietly stuffed the book under his clothes and went back to see the old man. Two kind and lonely people, one old and one small, are accompanied in this night.
The entire film is only 83 minutes long, and it tells about a small thing that is still in the homework book, but it reflects too many things in the adult world from the perspective of children. The adult world in the movie is not ugly, and adults also have their own constraints and helplessness, that is, these things create pedantic and indifference. The words of those adults occasionally remind me of myself: Have I spoken the same way and reacted to the children in this way? A children's film that reminds me of this is a success, it makes us stop trying to portray adults like that, and it encourages us to protect children like Amer.
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