TEHRAN -- Majid Majidi’s Midday Meal has drawn critical attention at the 31st Busan International Film Festival, where the Iranian director’s latest feature premiered in competition.
Reviews by Screen International, Variety and The Film Verdict highlight the film’s exploration of poverty, institutional neglect and the moral compromises demanded of a teacher determined to keep his school open.
Set in the arid southeastern Iranian village of Goorankesh, the 133-minute drama follows Davoud Soulan, played by Muhammad Rahimi, a part-time teacher whose precarious livelihood becomes inseparable from the survival of his students.
When the benefactor financing the school’s meal program dies, the children risk losing access to the food that brings them to class. With the school facing closure, Davoud begins making increasingly desperate choices to keep it running.
In Variety, critic Kambole Campbell frames the film around the right to food and the struggle to secure it in the absence of adequate government support. Davoud sacrifices his rent money and resorts to smuggling fuel to finance the school’s meals. His actions initially appear selfless, but Majidi gradually complicates the picture, revealing a protagonist whose generosity coexists with personal ambition and the need for financial security.
Campbell’s reading centers on the uneasy relationship between charity and survival. Davoud’s determination to help his students raises difficult questions about how far an individual can go when institutions fail to provide for basic needs.
Writing for Screen International, Elizabeth Kerr similarly emphasizes the film’s social urgency and restrained approach. “Majid trains his camera on the banal and lets his fury trickle through the narrative,” she writes, describing a filmmaker who builds his critique through everyday details rather than overt confrontation.
Kerr also praises Rahimi’s nuanced performance and the cinematography by Houman Behmanesh. The film’s measured pace and naturalistic visual language, she suggests, contribute to its appeal beyond the immediate festival setting.
For The Film Verdict, critic Clarence Tsui describes the film as “a slow-burning bonfire of moral vanities unfolding in a land beset by poverty and bureaucracy.”
Tsui highlights Rahimi’s transformation from a generous, good-humored teacher into a man increasingly worn down by the demands of survival. The performance anchors a narrative that questions Davoud’s understanding of his own goodness without dismissing the sincerity of his efforts.
The critic also points to the contrast between the harsh landscape and moments of vivid color, warmth and collective joy. These passages prevent the film from becoming a straightforward exercise in misery, preserving the humanism that has long characterized Majidi’s cinema.
Across the three reviews, a common thread emerges: Midday Meal refuses to divide its characters neatly into heroes and villains. Its central conflict lies in the distance between moral ideals and the practical demands of keeping a community alive.
Rather than offering a reassuring resolution, Majidi leaves audiences confronting an uncomfortable question: when institutions fail and resources disappear, can doing good remain separate from doing harm?
For a filmmaker internationally recognized for Children of Heaven, the Busan premiere marks a return to familiar humanist concerns, approached through a more morally unsettled lens. The critical response suggests that Midday Meal may have a promising future on the international arthouse circuit.