A construction site. A pair of lost shoes. A refugee camp in the rain. These are not the materials most directors choose for films that end up at the Oscars or win back-to-back prizes at Montreal. But Majid Majidi has built his entire body of work on exactly this kind of material, and the result is a filmography that feels less like cinema and more like someone secretly filming real life.
What separates Majidi from most filmmakers working in any language is something close to paradoxical: the simpler the story, the deeper it lands.
A Pair of Shoes and an Oscar Nomination
A boy loses his sister's shoes. That is the plot. Producers told Majidi the premise was only good enough for a short film. He made a feature. It became Iran's first Oscar-nominated film for Best Foreign Language Film, losing narrowly to Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful.
The film's weight doesn't come from dramatic twists. It comes from watching a small boy named Ali try to finish a race in third place — not first, because first means a trophy, but third means a new pair of shoes for his sister Zahra. He runs his heart out. He comes first. He sits down and cries.
That gap between effort and outcome, between what you wanted and what you got, is what Majidi keeps returning to across his films.
A Father's Shame, a Son's Love
A blind boy named Mohammad. A father who sees his son's disability not as part of life but as an obstacle to remarrying. The film won Best Film at Montreal the following year, making Majidi the only director to win that prize in consecutive editions.
The film doesn't answer its central question tidily. The father's shame is portrayed without excuse and without caricature. Mohammad himself is not a saint — he is a child who wants his father's love. Majidi doesn't tell you how to feel about either of them. He just shows them to you, in full.
Silence as Romance
Baran means rain in Farsi. It is a love story in which the two central characters share no dialogue.
Lateef, a young Iranian laborer, falls for Baran — an Afghan refugee girl who has disguised herself as a boy to work on his construction site. Majidi films their connection entirely through glances, close-ups, and the physicality of shared labor. There is no music swelling at the right moment, no declaration. Just two people in the same frame, and the space between them doing all the work.
The rain in the title is not decorative. When it finally falls, it feels earned. The European Film Academy gave Baran its Best Film award that year, alongside a third Montreal prize for Majidi.
Three consecutive films. Three best-film awards at major festivals. All three built on people commercial cinema typically treats as background.
The Endings That Don't Close
The pattern in Majidi's endings is something to sit with. Ali doesn't get the shoes in Children of Heaven. In The Song of Sparrows (2008), Karim starts earning real money for the first time and immediately breaks his leg. These are not tragedies in any classical sense. They are incompletions.
Life rarely wraps up. You achieve something and lose something else at the same moment. Majidi ends his films at exactly that point, and that is why they stay with you for days rather than hours.
The father's shame is there. The son's longing is there. The film doesn't resolve it — it just holds both at once, and trusts you to carry them out with you. On The Color of Paradise
Non-Actors, Real Places
His casting follows the same instinct. Majidi prefers non-professional actors, especially children, because he finds the camera more honest when the person in front of it hasn't been trained to perform for it. The children in Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise carry entire films on what look less like performances and more like documentary footage.
Locations are characters too, in his thinking. He has spoken about his discomfort with studio sets and his insistence on shooting where the story actually lives. Beyond the Clouds (2017), his first Bollywood film and first digital production, was shot almost entirely in Mumbai's lanes with only a single constructed set. The same philosophy, a different country, and it held.
The Biggest Bet
The Prophet's childhood on screen. Before release, critics questioned whether this was possible, or appropriate. Majidi's position was direct: this is an investment in Muslim cinema.
The film focuses on Muhammad's early years and never fully shows the Prophet's face — a choice that is both theologically careful and, as a result, visually striking. The absence becomes a presence. It is one of the quieter examples of how Majidi turns a constraint into a technique.
The Satyajit Ray Connection
Majidi has said he watched Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali more than thirty times and found it new each time. The affinity runs deeper than admiration. Ray built his films from poverty, family, and ordinary sorrow. Majidi described Ray's work as "an open window onto life — it looks like life, not cinema."
His own films earn the same description. Across all of it — the shoes, the blind boy, the construction site, the Mumbai lanes — Majidi looks at people other directors walk past and films them as though they are the only ones who matter. In his films, they are.
বাংলায় পড়ুন
This piece began as a Bengali essay published in 2020. If you read Bangla, the original — মাজিদ মাজিদী: সব্যসাচী বাজপাখি — goes deeper into the personal philosophy and life behind the films.
Read the Bengali original →