Filmmaker Majid Majidi, a card-carrying animist, proves again his attentiveness to, aliveness to, the surrounding world. The opening shots of domestic ostriches from the neck up, the pursuit of an escaped ostrich by ten men on foot, a solitary pursuer patrolling the hills in a homemade costume as an ostrich decoy — all of that, besides being fresh material on screen, presents evidence aplenty. The scene soon shifts to the big city, Tehran, where the Little Man protagonist, shopping for a new hearing aid for his daughter, falls into a new line of work as a motorbike cabbie, with a new set of sights to take in. (E.g., the assorted salvage strapped onto the back of his bike to be carted home at the end of a day: an antenna, a window frame, a mini-fridge.) The film, an oppressive depiction of hand-to-mouth existence, gets within arm’s reach of the sentimentality of De Sica-style humanism, but the unlovableness of the driven, desperate, humorless, high-handed patriarchal hero repels a full embrace. Reza Naji, Maryam Akbari, Hamed Aghazi, Shabnam Akhlaghi. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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