By Sheida Eslami
The name Chabahar city in Sistan and Baluchestan province had already achieved international recognition, but following the renewed US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran on February 28, 2026, the name of this region became even more indelibly etched in memory, marked by the colors of blood and victimhood.
At the 2026 Busan International Film Festival, it became a prism through which the light of art, resistance, deprivation, and the struggle for survival under the shadow of war and sanctions was cast upon the world of cinema.
There, beneath the vertical rays of the southern Iranian sun, which fall upon thirsty, cracked earth, amid the elongated lines traced by the wind across the Makran hills and the frail hands struggling to acquire knowledge, yet refusing to give up, cinema has once again returned to its authentic roots and existential purpose through Midday Meal: a polished mirror in which the lives of those trapped in hardship can shine anew.
On the closing night of the Busan International Film Festival, when the silver screen gave way and the name ‘Midday Meal’ resounded as the winner of Best Asian Film, the festival hall was confronted not with the customary smiles and ceremonial courtesies, but with an emotional, philosophical, and moral shock.
Majid Majidi, the renowned Iranian filmmaker, whose face bears the imprint of decades spent alongside the world’s marginalized communities and ordinary people at the heart of Iranian society, reached for the festival trophy. Yet his gaze extended beyond the festival’s symbolic boundaries, fixed upon the distant, bloodied, and dust-covered horizons of his homeland.
After his name was announced as the winner and he took to the stage to receive the Best Film Award, he devoted his speech to the situation of the Iranian people in recent years amid illegal Western sanctions and the consequences of the war imposed by the United States and the Zionist regime. In a clear, authentic, and unyielding voice, he shattered the calculated silence and cowardly self-preservation of international platforms.
At the beginning of his remarks, Majidi dedicated the Busan Film Festival’s Best Film Award to the Iranian people and, referring to their resistance in the face of foreign pressure, said: “The Iranian people stood courageously, refused to submit to oppression, and continue to resist.”
Continuing his speech, he referred to the economic and medical sanctions imposed on Iran, emphasizing that decades of pressure had failed to force the Iranian people into submission
“For 48 years, the Iranian people have been subjected to the harshest economic and medical sanctions, but we did not surrender. And when they (US et al) saw that we would not surrender, they subjected us to the most brutal attacks.”
In his power-packed and evocative remarks, the decorated Iranian filmmaker described the decades of sanctions and recent military aggression as extensions of the pressures imposed with the aim of forcing the Iranian people to retreat and surrender.
Another part of Majidi’s speech was devoted to the US-Israeli attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab on February 28 and the tragic martyrdom of at least 168 students. Recalling the bitter fate of the Minab children, he said: “On the first day of the attack, 168 innocent children were torn to pieces, and the bodies of some of these children were never found.”
By raising this issue at an international film ceremony, Majidi sought to draw the attention of those attending the Busan Film Festival to the suffering of families and children victimized by the war on Iran.
Referring to the scale of the aggression, he spoke about the targeting of civilian areas. He said homes, universities, and residential neighborhoods had been targeted, and that the Iranian nation had lost 4,000 to 5,000 people as a result of this unprovoked and illegal war of aggression.
Raising the question of why Iran was subjected to such pressure and unprovoked attacks, Majidi also emphasized the Iranian people’s desire for independence. Addressing the audience at the Busan Film Festival, he asked: “What do you think our people’s crime is? They only want to be independent … We will stand firm until the end.”
And it was precisely at that moment that art emerged from the cocoon of abstract formalism, demonstrating that unless a truthful depiction of reality arises from the pain of the land and the dignity of a nation, it remains nothing more than a luxury commodity in the hands of the entertainment industry.
‘Midday Meal’, Majidi’s eleventh feature-length fiction film and his first work in six years since his last film, Sun Children – which earned the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival for its lead actor, Rouhollah Zamani – represents a meaningful aesthetic return to the filmmaker’s cinematic birthplace.
In fact, after three and a half decades, Majidi has completed the circle of his illustrious filmmaking career, returning to the very region where his identity-driven cinema was born: Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan Province, the Chabahar region, and the geographical setting of his first feature film, Baduk.
If Baduk, with its bitter cries of adolescents trapped in the clutches of border traffickers, shook Iranian cinema, Majidi later transformed innocence into a shared language of the global conscience through ‘The Children of Heaven’ – the first Iranian film in history to be among the five final Oscar nominees—and the naturalistic illumination of ‘The Color of Paradise’.
Majidi tested the formal breadth of his cinema in every dimension over the following decades: from his empathetic portrayal of Afghan migrants’ suffering in ‘Batam’ and winning the Silver Bear in Berlin with ‘The Song of Sparrows’, to his bold entry into large-scale international productions with the historical and religious project ‘Muhammad: The Messenger of God’, and his cinematic exploration of life in the slums of India in ‘Beyond the Clouds’.
Now, in ‘Midday Meal’, Majidi filters his longstanding concern for children and adolescents through a gaze that is considerably bleaker, more realistic, and free from romantic naivety.
The film’s story unfolds in the water-scarce, desolate village of Goran Kesh, near Chabahar, which is a severely arid and inhospitable land where survival itself is an exhausting struggle. At the heart of the drama is an honorable teacher named Davoud Solan, brought vividly to life through Mohammad Rahimi’s layered, introspective, and deeply restrained performance.
Solan’s professional position is precarious. While dreaming of buying a modest shelter where he can live alongside his elderly mother, he oversees a school whose lifeline hangs by a thread. The school can survive only if it can provide the children with their most basic biological necessity: one hot meal at midday, in other words, lunch.
In the film’s world, the relationship between education and survival has become entirely tangible and interdependent. However, when the school’s sole benefactor and financial supporter dies suddenly, and his heirs refuse to continue funding the students’ lunches, a chain of domino effects threatens the entire educational life of the region.
Without food, the children living in traditional thatched huts have no incentive to attend school. With the classrooms empty, the school will close permanently within two weeks, and Davoud Solan will inevitably lose his job.
Solan and his mother abandon their rented home and move into a corner of one of the classrooms so that the little money they would otherwise spend on rent can be used to buy flour and supplies for lunch. Yet individual sacrifice cannot fill the depth of the catastrophe.
To cover the school’s expenses, Davoud is forced to enter the perilous business of fuel and diesel smuggling, and other menial works
The outstanding quality of ‘Midday Meal’, which sets it miles apart from conventional charity dramas, lies in Majidi’s deliberate avoidance of creating a pristine, entirely virtuous, and flawless character. Davoud Solan is a largely honest man, yet he is caught in a web of devastating internal conflicts.
With remarkable patience, deliberation, and a process of discovery, the film demonstrates how the desperation of making ends meet gradually drives human virtue toward compromises with wrongdoing.
The conflict between pragmatism and generosity initially emerges on a small scale. Where? In Solan’s agonizing hesitation over accepting eager students from neighboring villages, because every additional child consumes a share of the food allocated to the others.
It also emerges in his shocking anger toward his mother for feeding several guests in keeping with the hospitality traditions of Iran’s Baluch people.
In essence, the film suggests that, for a teacher who cannot even guarantee tomorrow’s bread for his classroom, traditional generosity becomes a threat to the survival of the community as a whole.
Mohammad Rahimi’s commanding performance and Majidi’s carefully considered shot composition deliberately keep Solan’s inner motivations shrouded in dramatic ambiguity until the very end. One of the characters, however, explicitly raises the bitter question of how much of Solan’s struggle stems from concern for the children and how much from his personal fear of losing his meager salary and job security.
In the film’s world, these two motivations do not cancel each other out. At the moment of catastrophe, human beings are an amalgam of ideals and fears. Yet it is precisely at this level that Davoud’s unexpected concealment of the presence of a frail, sick elderly man under his care deepens the light and dark layers of this character-driven drama and compels the audience to empathize with him.
Through these universal human dimensions, Majidi’s film avoids falling into the abyss of absolute nihilism. Consider the moment when a strict administrative inspector, amid the height of a tense inspection, senses a glimmer of Davoud’s benevolence and self-sacrifice beneath the dry layers of regulations and decides to turn a blind eye and help him. This moment, too, belongs to the same strands of hope and authentic human connection that characterize Iranian cinema and Majidi’s works.
Nevertheless, through its mature realism, the film refuses to treat these isolated acts of individual compassion as the ultimate solution to the crisis. Instead, it leaves its ending open to the unresolved questions of the human conscience, refusing to impose a self-justifying or artificially happy conclusion. And that is cinema.
The unanimous acclaim from international film pundits and critics at the Busan Film Festival reflects their precise understanding of the depth of Majidi’s vision and the film’s bold realism.
Writing in Variety, Kambole Campbell observed that Majidi never creates a flawless hero. Despite his self-sacrifice, Solan succumbs to anger and ruthless compromises with his moral principles, while Rahimi’s controlled performance makes these shifting boundaries between benevolence and the desperate struggle for survival profoundly convincing.
Elizabeth Kerr, writing in Screen Daily, also praised Majidi’s return to authentic social drama, commending the patient, devastating narrative and its avoidance of political sloganeering, alongside its interplay with the rugged hills of Baluchestan.
Clarence Tsui, in The Film Verdict, focused on the psychological erosion of the characters, emphasizing that the children in this film learn the harsh calculus of survival much earlier than usual. Majidi’s strength, Tsui noted, lies in refusing to make moral judgment of Davoud Solan an easy matter.
South Korea’s Cine21, meanwhile, focused on the psychology of desperation, exploring the destructive conflict between the commitment to saving the school and the sacrifice of the possibility of a secure personal life. It identifies the protagonist’s inner contradiction as the film’s beating heart.
The greatest aesthetic and intellectual lesson of ‘Midday Meal’, and of Majidi’s historic presence on the international stage, lies in dismantling the false dichotomy between anti-national blackwashing and official propaganda.
For years, dominant Western media currents and politicized festival circles have sought to establish the fallacious notion that any criticism of social ills or portrayal of poverty in the Global South amounts to a rejection of one’s roots, a loss of identity, or alignment with projects of sanctions, intervention, and foreign pressure.
Conversely, others believe that defending one’s homeland and raising one’s voice against the arrogant hegemonic powers requires turning a blind eye to class divisions, bureaucratic inefficiency, and the suffering of the deprived.
Through the masterpiece ‘Midday Meal’ and his enduring manifesto from the Busan podium, the legendary Iranian filmmaker shattered this sterile equation. He demonstrated that the film’s uncompromising criticism of structural neglect, an exhausted bureaucracy, and the crisis of making ends meet in places such as Goran Kesh – conditions that could be replicated anywhere in the world – is not a form of treacherous blackwashing intended to win the sympathy of Western judges.
Rather, it erupts from a profound love and boundless devotion to the land, the deprived, and the children of Sistan and Baluchestan. Their suffering may itself be rooted in nearly 50 years of American wars and crippling sanctions against Iran, as well as the wounds left by the West’s historical colonialism against the country.
This same filmmaker, whose camera composes an unflinching lament for the deprivation of Chabahar’s hut-dwelling communities, stands at the highest expression of Asia’s cultural diplomacy and places his own chest as a shield before his homeland’s independence.
By connecting the burned palm trees of Baluchestan to the blood of the innocent children of Minab and the Iranian nation’s historic perseverance, he reminds the world that the suffering of the Iranian people is not a sign of weakness or a desire to surrender. It is the heavy price of standing firm against the historical hegemonic ambitions of global hegemons.
In Majidi’s vision, the pursuit of independence and the struggle for social justice are two sides of the same coin. A society that refuses to bow before foreign bullying is the same society whose artist weeps tears of blood over the deprivation of children in its most impoverished border regions.
Majidi’s ‘Midday Meal’, beyond being a triumphant cinematic event and a major step on the road to the Oscars, is a cultural manifesto in defense of humanity and an excavation of the inner layers of the truth of human life and the challenges of the human spirit, conveyed through a brilliant story with all the hallmarks of accomplished drama.
The echo of Majidi’s historic speech in Busan transmitted a clear message to history: committed art in the Global South has never needed an artificial lens of neutrality or to pay tribute to centers of power.
Majid Majidi proved that authenticity is the child of roots. As long as a filmmaker plants the pulse of his work in the soil of his homeland and expresses the suffering of his people with courage, his song will never remain merely local.
Instead, it will become the most resonant anthem of humanity’s conscience – a song rising from scorched deserts, forever engraving the weight of suffering, dignity, and the independence of the Iranian people upon the pinnacle of contemporary civilization.
Sheida Islami is a Tehran-based writer, media advisor and cultural critic.
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