Narratives and Aesthetics of Iranian Children’s Films

Films over the period have subjected children in productions to represent the adult world. These children have been used in place of men and women to give expression to their anguishes and aspirations. In Iranian films, children appear in a particular way: more often than not, these appearances are fraught with certain political intentions resultant of varying social milieu of the country. Children in Iranian films have been fortunate to show their faces in front of the world through global festivals because of the quality of the films they were central figures of. Politically, this has been a rule after the Iranian revolution. Towards the end of the 1990s, children became the hallmark of cinema from Iran. The young characters in Iranian films were used by the filmmakers to make the world realise the worth of Iranian culture. They wanted their young characters to symbolise innocence and emotions whereas the Iranian polity and society had been stained with violence and perceived by the world with scepticism. Against this background, the article is an effort to unravel the meanings behind the employment of children as protagonists in the modern films of Iran. This analysis has been made by reviewing some of the prominent productions. Through the analysis, it is being concluded that the portrayal of children in Iranian films is a tact employed by the film makers to bypass the censorship and other consequences following the strict rules imposed by the political atmosphere after the revolution. The New Wave cinema depicts multiple modern characteristics of the Iranian society among the problems confronted by young people and their social institutions. The employment of children as key figures in their movies helped the producers to indirectly present the various problems of the society in a symbolic manner. Films of the 1990s had a common structure that was built around the mystery of the proactive child. The themes of the films discussed were made so in order to accommodate the child figures in them.

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