Zang-e Tafrih

Others can undoubtedly comment more effectively than I on the technical aspects of this film, or what it means relative to Kiarostami's emerging voice. Those are certainly fascinating things, given that it was just his second short, made a year before his first feature length film. To me it shows just how much interest he took in children from the very beginning, how much he loved them. He finds a human story in the little events in a day of a boy's life, and is able to evoke feelings buried in the audience's psyche. The pain of being punished, chased, or walking along in a dangerous place. The boy has done wrong by breaking a window and stealing a ball, but he had my full empathy, because this is sometimes what kids do. You can feel a little growing up taking place for him in the crucible of the world here, just as Kiarostami was growing as a filmmaker.