Great child acting is rare: so is great adult acting, and so is great directing of children and adults. But they all come together in this lovely, beautifully composed debut feature drenched in a subtle but urgent political meaning. It comes from 38-year-old film-maker Panah Panahi, son of the Iranian director and pro-democracy activist Jafar Panahi, who has this month been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for criticising the Iranian government.
It takes the form of a road movie, though that Hollywood term doesn’t really cover Hit the Road, which is part of Iranian cinema’s entirely distinct genre of films shot semi-covertly in a car, and has evolved to avoid Iranian state snooping. It is a mode of film-making using the interior possibilities of the car, which is both prop, symbol, mobile location and means of transporting cast and crew about without attracting attention during filming. Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran are other examples.
