Renowned Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi, best known for his landmark 1997 drama “Children of Heaven”—historic as the first Iranian production ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature—returns with a poignant and morally complex new feature. Titled “Midday Meal,” the film shifts its focus away from the literal art of cooking to explore the profound rituals surrounding food, particularly how those rituals amplify in value against a backdrop of deep scarcity. More importantly, the movie becomes an unflinching examination of the fundamental right to sustenance, depicting a punishing, everyday struggle to secure and provide nourishment in an environment utterly abandoned by governmental care.
Set against the stark backdrop of Goorankesh, an Iranian village housed within an incredibly arid and seemingly inhospitable region, the narrative centers on schoolteacher Davoud Soulan, sensitively portrayed by Mohammad Rahimi. Soulan’s professional existence rests upon remarkably precarious foundations. While his official title ties him to the ministry of education, his position is merely that of a contractor, and his livelihood has historically relied on private funding. This fragile system shatters when his primary benefactor passes away. Complicating matters further, the deceased man’s heirs refuse to continue the financial investment that has long allowed Soulan to provide daily lunches for his students.
This abrupt pause in the food supply creates an immediate, catastrophic domino effect that threatens the entire school. In Goorankesh, without the promise of a midday meal, the children simply stop attending classes. Education experts estimate that such an absence of attendance will inevitably force the school to shut down within a mere two weeks, compounding the isolation and hardship faced by the local youth.
Soulan fully accepts the semi-transactional nature of his relationship with his students, recognizing that it is nearly impossible to fault a child for being driven by hunger. Consequently, audiences are bound to be moved by the desperate, high-stakes measures the teacher takes to keep the doors of his school open. To minimize his personal expenses, Soulan lives directly inside the school building, diverting what would have been his rent money directly toward purchasing food. To supplement these efforts, he moonlights by smuggling and selling fuel—an illicit pastime actively engaged in by many community members, including children.
However, the film deliberately avoids painting Soulan as a straightforward hero simply choosing to do the right thing. His fierce determination to keep the school operational comes packaged with unavoidable moral compromises, and this friction is precisely what makes “Midday Meal” a far more interesting, layered, and fraught cinematic experience than a conventional uplifting drama.
The quiet, escalating conflict between pragmatism and pure generosity begins on a small scale before progressively compounding. Initially, this tension is visible in Soulan’s hesitation to admit children from neighboring villages into his already strained classroom, and later erupts into uncharacteristic rage directed at his own mother for feeding visiting guests at the potential expense of the students’ future meals. Through Rahimi’s grounded performance and Majidi’s patient, observant exploration of his character’s split-second reactions, Soulan emerges as deeply human rather than an idealistic, untainted cipher representing how a director might wish the world to operate.
As desperation mounts, Soulan’s actions drift into increasingly dubious territory. The complexity of his character is underscored when another individual in the community openly challenges his motives, questioning how much of his exhausting labor stems from genuine charity versus a self-interested pursuit of maintaining a guaranteed salary.
Throughout the narrative, Rahimi expertly balances the character’s stark vulnerability with just enough ambiguity regarding his long-term plans for the school. This delicate balance is further accentuated by Majidi’s restrained, naturalistic directorial approach. By deliberately obfuscating Soulan’s immediate intentions—beyond his baseline desire to keep the school running—the film develops into a fascinating character study. Rahimi plays Soulan as a mostly sincere yet deeply conflicted man, driven primarily by a crushing sense of desperation that occasionally makes him capable of surprising deceptions. One such deception is carefully guarded from scene to scene, particularly after a sick elderly man falls unexpectedly into Soulan’s care.
At one pivotal point in the film, Soulan defends his illicit activities by pointing out that the crime of fuel-smuggling is virtually negligible when compared to the vast operations of powerful barons who profit off the exact same commodities on a grand scale. He asks a fundamental question: Shouldn’t the underlying motivation and the practical, life-sustaining outcome of an act count for something?
Majidi relentlessly tests the limits of this sentiment throughout “Midday Meal,” often to devastating dramatic effect. The film originates from a place of deep frustration regarding systemic neglect and the societal strain placed upon a community left entirely without institutional support. Soulan’s rare encounters with representatives of the law are consistently exasperating. In one instance, a local law enforcement officer harshly chastises Soulan for setting a poor example for his students through his lawbreaking, completely ignoring the desperate survival context. Simultaneously, a bureaucrat from the education department treats Soulan’s organization and financing with intense suspicion, despite the department having previously abandoned him to fend for itself.
This institutional disconnect fuels the underlying anger of “Midday Meal,” capturing an innate frustration at how bureaucratic organizations continually fail to execute the most basic and vital human decision: providing for people in need. Majidi’s matter-of-fact visual style underscores the cold, unyielding reality that Soulan attempts to navigate, successfully stripping away any semblance of heavy-handed didacticism. For every genuinely good deed Soulan performs, there is an inescapable underside of ruthless pragmatism attached to it.
Yet, the film refuses to descend into a punishingly bleak experience, occasionally offering moments of grace where good deeds seem to circle back to their initiator. Despite his apparent sternness and the broader board’s outright negligence, a visiting education inspector eventually recognizes the genuine charity behind Soulan’s grueling efforts and decides to extend whatever help he can muster—even though the inspection scene itself remains a masterclass in nail-biting tension. Ultimately, in a film that initially threatens to present a simplistic moral binary, “Midday Meal” concludes with no easy answers.
