Caméra d’Or Year 18 (1995): Panahi’s Iranian Fable, “White Balloon”

Jafar Panahi’s latest film, the 2025 Palm d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident, is nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar and other awards.

Panahi had made an impressive feature debut in 1995, with The White Balloon, a superb children’s fable, based on a script by Abbas Kiarostami, his mentor and the country’s premier filmmaker (Taste of Cherry).

Grade: B+

The White Balloon

The film received strong critical reviews and won awards, including the Camera d’Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Fest.

The film was selected as the Iranian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at Oscar, but was not nominated. Earlier, Iran had tried to withdraw the film from contention but the academy refused to accept the withdrawal.

Set on the eve of the Iranian New Year, the story opens in a Tehran market, where all of the major characters are briefly seen, though they are not introduced.

Razieh (Aida Mohammadkhani), a girl of 7, sees a goldfish in a shop and begins nagging her mother to buy it for the festivities, instead of the skinny ones in her family’s pond.

On their way home, mother and daughter pass a courtyard where a male crowd gathers to watch two snake charmers. Razieh wants to see what is happening but her mother pulls her away, claiming it is not good for her to watch these things. Upset about her mother’s refusal to let her buy a new goldfish, she continues to nag.

Her older brother Ali (Mohsen Kalifi) returns from a shopping errand for their father, who complains that he asked Ali to buy shampoo, not soap.

Razieh asks him to help in changing her mother’s mind about the goldfish, bribing him with a balloon. Ali thinks that the 100 tomans cost for the goldfish is a waste of money but helps Razieh in petitioning their mother, who gives the family’s last 500-toman banknote and asks her to bring back the change. Razieh then sets off with an empty glass jar to the fish shop.

Razieh then manages to lose the money twice, first in encountering the snake charmer, and then when dropping the money through the grate at the entrance to a store which has been closed.

Razieh and Ali attempt to retrieve the money and in the process encounter a kind older woman at the fish shop, the owners of another shop, and an Iranian soldier. The money, however, is always just out of reach.

Finally, the siblings receive help from a young Afghan street vendor selling balloons, which he carries on a wooden stick, with ony three balloons. Razieh, Ali, and the Afghan boy are unable to retrieve the note with the stick, so Ali sticks gum to the stick to retrieve the bill. Ali leaves to buy gum, but returns without any, and finds that the Afghan boy has left Razieh at the grate.

However, the Afghan boy soon returns with his stick, now with only one white balloon, and a pack of chewing gum. The group attaches a piece of gum to the balloon stick, and reach down through the grate to pull the money out.

The film ends on a still shot of the young Afghan boy, as he sits at the grate watching Ali and Razieh leave for the shop to buy the goldfish.

The boy sits alone with his stick and white balloon, then gets up to walk away, as the Iranian year 1374 begins.

A deceptively simple yet powerfully effective story, seen through a child’s eyes, The White Balloon offers a fresh perspective on seemingly familiar surroundings.

In its documentary-style realism, relying in non-professional actors, the movie captures vividly the rhythms of everyday life, as experienced through the prism of children.

Credits:

Directed, edited by Jafar Panahi
Written by Abbas Kiarostami
Produced by Kurosh Mazkouri
Cinematography Farzad Jadat
Distributed by October Films

Running time: 85 minutes