Majidi's 'Midday Meal': A Teacher Smuggles Fuel to Feed Students — SkimNews
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- Majid Majidi directs "Midday Meal," returning to socially-charged Iranian drama after 1997's "Children of Heaven," the first Iranian production nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar.
- The film is set in the arid Iranian village of Goorankesh, where schoolteacher Davoud Soulan (played by Mohammad Rahimi) faces shutdown of his school within an estimated two weeks if student lunches stop.
- Soulan works as a ministry-of-education contractor whose school is privately funded by a deceased benefactor; the dead man's heirs refuse to continue the investment, leaving him with no institutional safety net.
- Soulan lives inside the school building to redirect rent money toward food, and moonlights smuggling and selling fuel — a trade the film notes is widespread enough that children engage in it too.
- The film's central tension is moral ambiguity: one character openly questions how much of Soulan's charity is genuine and how much is pursuit of a guaranteed salary.
- Soulan argues that fuel-smuggling is a lesser crime than the barons profiting from the same trade, a rationale Majidi tests throughout the film.
- An education inspector ultimately decides to help Soulan despite prior institutional negligence, giving the film a moment of grace amid its portrait of systemic failure.
- Law enforcement encounters are portrayed as exasperating rather than villainous — an officer chastises Soulan for being a bad role model — avoiding tidy moral binaries.
Why it matters: Majidi, who became Iran's first Oscar-nominated filmmaker with 1997's 'Children of Heaven,' returns to socially conscious Iranian storytelling and uses a school-lunch crisis to indict governmental neglect. The film's deliberate moral ambiguity — questioning whether the protagonist's charity is genuine or driven by his need to keep his salary — refuses the easy uplift such material typically trades in, making it a more demanding watch than the title suggests.
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