A Very Moving Short Iranian Film Concerning the Street Children and Peddlers There, Prewar.
On Sunday, my wife and I went to an Lighthouse Film Festival, an anthology of short films, a retrospective being shown at the Princeton Garden Theater, The Best of the Fest.
Back in the early 90's, when we lived in San Diego on the few occasions where my wife and I went to Mexico, down to Ensenada, we were besieged on the street by children selling chicklets. You felt so bad and you found yourself handing out money and realizing you would never have enough. You could go completely broke in an hour trying hard just to be a human being and you will fail at it.
I experienced something very similar in Mumbai, where I was on a business trip, in the early 2000's, and again in Cuernavaca, again on a business trip.
This brings me to one of the films in the anthology that I can't get out of my mind, an Iranian short about children in the same space in Iran:
UNPARALLEL WORLD
...a film by Mohamad Yaraghi...
It's a scripted film, but it clearly portrays a reality in Iran.
How is it that we live in a world where poverty is allowed, never mind war on the impoverished?
In the film the death of a toddler being runover on the street when the light changes is portrayed, her death being no more important than running over a squirrel or a raccoon in the street here.
How?
How?
How is this allowed, and now, now, bombs?
I don't know where or how one can see this short film, but if one finds a way to do so, one should, and doing so, reach into the depths of our sad humanity.