Any documentary that can make you alternately laugh helplessly and choke up with emotion in 78 perfectly edited minutes is worth celebrating. In Tonight’s Homework (Mashgh-e emshab), which made its world premiere at IDFA, first-time co-directors Ashkan Nejati and Mehran Nematollahi interview a passel of seven- to eight-year-old schoolchildren, using the same questions that the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami posed to tykes in his early masterpiece, Homework. The answers they receive from today’s kids are quite different, to put it mildly. The reference to the original film lends the film context, but whatever their original intention was, Nejati and Nematollahi expose the startling class divide in Iran in a cleverly constructed film that underlines the distance Iranian society has come in the intervening 32 years.
In a schoolroom, a man is measuring little boys’ waists (later, we see a child’s oversize pants are held up with a wire in place of a belt.) Outside, the pupils are told to line up in neat rows and respond to the headmaster’s words. “Allah-o. . .” and a high-pitched chorus answers him, “Akbar!” Then the principal shouts some warning phrases like “Mouths. . .” and the answer comes, “shut!” So far, school life seems about the same as in Kiarostami’s day, when verses from the Qu’ran were sung by boys in the schoolyard and mountains of homework were the bane of their existence.
Suddenly a modern car appears on a modern street, dropping off a boy in front of his school, and Hamed Fereshteh Hakmat’s images become crisp and full of pleasing color. Somewhere, a little boy of seven or eight is sitting in front of a neutral dark green studio background and talking to an invisible camera. Someone is asking him questions. “What is homework?” He thinks and twists in uncertainty, until he comically admits, “I really don’t know.”
The adult voice questions other kids, who say they sometimes spend less than half an hour doing their homework. A principal confirms that since parents today have so little time to devote to their offspring, “homework is done at school.” The kids seem to learn just the same. One is cuter than the next and they all seem well-adjusted as they grin unselfconsciously at the camera. Another of Kiarostami’s questions: “Are you punished for bad grades?” They don’t know what punishment is. Their fathers are rich, they’ve already been abroad in more countries than they can remember, they have tons of toys at home. They don’t know what poverty means. When one boy starts to list his father’s sports cars, it becomes a little much.
Then other schoolboys appear on screen. Their faces are marked and scarred, their hair badly cut, and their clothes the wrong size. Their eyes are serious and older than their years. They have their own definition of homework: selling trinkets or playing a drum on the street after school, running from the police and social services, turning their meager earnings of $1-$4 over to their illiterate parents. They know what punishment means, too. Compared to the giggly children who trustingly tell stories to the camera, they inhabit a different universe.
Superbly edited by Vahid Golestan, there is never a dull moment as the two worlds alternate on screen. With a comic’s gift for timing, he cuts from one adorable child to another in a parade of hilarious expressions and answers. One little girl in a school uniform and hijab, when asked to tell a story, launches into a hair-raising account of a cannibal family at the scene of a plane crash, ending with an outrageously misogynistic punchline. When she finishes this appalling tale, the film crew freezes, unsure how to respond, then bursts into applause while the little girl beams.
On the other side of the class divide, captivating kids give way to moving glimpses into difficult lives. A boy catches our attention and sympathy as he ponders each question as though his life depended on it. Nothing lighthearted here. No expensive toys or trips – he works to keep his family alive, and it’s obvious how attached he is to them when he says, in a shaky voice, that he wants them to live forever. He met a girl, another street peddler, in the underground, but the experience was too precious to talk about. When asked if he’ll send his own son to work on the street, he shakes his head no.
This clash of worlds is beautifully captured in the simple, uncluttered photography and camerawork that is a pleasure to look at – camera angles close on a girl’s hands playing a guitar, or the rich expressiveness of a small human face. The final scenes follow Kiarostami’s original D.P. as he drives around the streets of Tehran, hunting for the school where ‘Homework’ was shot. But society has moved on.
Directors, screenwriters: Ashkan Nejati, Mehran Nematollahi
Producer: Ashkan Nejati
Co-producer: Mehran Nematollahi
Cinematography: Hamed Fereshteh Hakmat
Editing: Vahid Golestan
Sound design: Seyed Reza Godazar
World sales: Iranian Independents
Venue: IDFA (in Luminous and Focus Program: The Future Tense)
In Farsi
78 minutes
