Sun Children’s screenwriters play smart games with the viewer’s expectations

School of the Sun, that’s the name of the educational institution where 12-year-old Ali attends, along with 280 other boys from the lower class of Tehran. Ali is looking for a spot in the building where not a speck of sunlight can reach. A villainous boss has given him a big assignment: in the tunnels under the adjacent graveyard is buried a treasure that can only be reached through the school cellar. If Ali finds the pot full of gold pieces, he gets to keep some of the loot.

Together with three friends, orphaned street urchins like him, Ali reports to the school staff. They that they are registered. Do they sometimes have no right to education? Then Ali slips into the basement as soon as he can. With his mates on the lookout, he cuts and digs his way to the gold.

Four boys in search of treasure: it sounds like an old-fashioned end-all-all-around adventure. The question is whether this will also happen in the gripping, sometimes comical and never sentimental Iranian drama Sun Children. Cinematographer Majid Majidi (baran, The Song of Sparrows) dedicated his film to the 152 million children forced into child labor worldwide, and that assignment sucks the innocence out of the story.

Ali (Roohollah Zamani) should be in the classroom, not in the tunnels. And Zahra (Shamila Shirzad), his girlfriend who fled from Afghanistan, shouldn’t be carrying illegal merchandise through the subway. Sun Children, awarded the prize of the youth jury at the Film by the Sea film festival in Vlissingen, firmly grasps this raw underground existence. The film rushes through the subway corridors with the children as they are chased by the police. The crawl spaces under the graveyard feel increasingly cramped and dangerous.

What a handsome, poignant lead role by debutant Zamani, who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young actor at the Venice Film Festival. And how cleverly Majdi and co-writer Nima Javidi play with narrative conventions, and thus with your expectations. Headmaster Rafie (Javad Ezati) is the archetypal teacher who can bring out the good in discarded children like Ali, but he doesn’t get the chance to do so. Instead, it’s Ali who teaches him the finer points of the headbutt. School movies like to show mutinous children escaping their school prison. In Sun Children it is the other way around: when the school is closed due to high rent debts, the students climb over the wall, cheering their way inside.

The treasure will surely prove to be the solution to the money problems, you hope. After all, that’s how it goes in films that do believe in fairy tales.