Bacheha-Ye aseman [Children of Heaven] (1997)

(YouTube Streaming, December 2021) Ugh. By now, films like Children of Heaven form their own subgenre: World-wide tales of childhood misery with incredibly low stakes highlighting exactly how much misery is involved. From Bicycle Thieves to Capharnäum, they’re a feature of nearly every oh-so-serious list of top movies of World Cinema, and that’s when or why I had to see the film in order to check that mark. It doesn’t mean I had to like it, though. While I can see all of the elements used by writer-director Majid Majidi to make the film’s young protagonists likable, and while I can’t help but appreciate the film’s success in taking us to a poor neighbourhood in late-1990s Iran (as a pair of shoes becomes what the protagonists are fighting for), this is not the kind of film I sit through happily. Its inclusion on the IMDB Top-250 is the sole reason why I saw it — that checkmark having been checked, I’m not going to spend more time thinking about it.