THE WHITE BALLOON (74)

Directed by: Jafar Panahi

Starring: Aida Mohammadkhani, Mohsen Kafili, Fereshteh Sadr Orfani

The Pitch: A small Iranian girl pesters successfully for money to buy a goldfish, but has many a close call on the way to her prize.

Theo Sez: The cinema's power to transfix at its purest, taking barely enough elements to qualify as a story and creating something rich and haunting - and almost totally absorbing - simply through everyday rhythms and their observation by a fluid but never flashy camera. One thinks automatically of neo-realism, but that's only halfway accurate - BICYCLE THIEVES and UMBERTO D may seem artless but they're meticulously contrived to elicit an emotional response, whereas this seems genuinely content with life-goes-on humanism; and the political message implicit in the Italian films is (inevitably) almost absent here. It's left to the title to try and smuggle it in, hinting at more than meets the eye in the supporting character of the Afghan balloon-seller - a symbol (perhaps) of the marginalised minorities that Iran, like our young heroine, must learn to work with if it's to achieve its goals. Nothing in the movie is belaboured - not the abusiveness of the children's unseen father, nor the endemic poverty of this Third World country - which is partly why it all works so well. But the secret ingredient is its generosity of spirit, the refusal to stop believing, even in the face of ubiquitous evidence to the contrary, that the world is basically a good place.