manendra-lodhi Firstly the film focuses on children, so your opinions become a little different while watching the film. Because their facial expressions and all are so cute, that you would fail sometimes to notice whether the film is really good or not. The story revolves around a 500 $ note which is given to a girl to buy a fish. However she keeps losing her all the time. People try to take that money from her in different ways but not forcibly. This thing is not portrayed properly. The story of the film is fantastic but I believe that it was not handled properly. Some characters seemed to be inserted forcibly. Also it lacked the child emotions like those present in films like children of heaven.Verdict: "Not necessary to keep in the watch list."

ackstasis Assuming you're keeping up-to-date with your current affairs, you'll have heard that the great democracy of Iran yesterday jailed director Jafar Panahi for six years, and forbade him from making movies, going abroad, or giving media interviews for the next twenty years. Allegedly, he had been producing a film critical of the Iranian government; that is, he was calling a spade a spade.As a sort of one-man protest, I decided to watch one of Panahi's movies. 'The White Balloon (1995)' was the director's feature debut, and won the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It tells an extremely simple tale, almost in real time: a young girl is given a 500-toman banknote to buy a goldfish for the Iranian New Year. On the way to the market, she loses the money down a sewer grate, and spends the rest of the film trying to get it back, either ignored or aided by the strangers she meets.Putting the plot so simply doesn't really suggest a riveting cinematic experience, but I must say I was taken by the effectiveness of the film. We experience the bustling marketplace through the lens of the young girl, and genuinely share her mixed emotions. This really struck a chord with me. When I was a prep (age 5), I got lost during a school excursion, and I can still recall the dropping of my stomach, the quickened breathing, the welling of tears (don't worry, we got icy poles afterwards!). That's the feeling I got here, particularly when the snake charmer stole the girl's money and claimed it as a "donation." I felt as helpless as she did.Fortunately, the film's overriding emotion is one of optimism. Strangers, seeing a child in distress, stop to offer their assistance. A young Afghan balloon-seller proffers a stick and chewing gum with which to retrieve the out-of-reach money. The girl's brother, a resourceful kid of about age ten, arrives on the scene, and suddenly everything seems like it's going to be OK. Sometimes simple films can be the most enjoyable of all.

Pierre Radulescu I watched this movie totally by surprise. I found out just one hour before that it was scheduled on TV.It started slowly, maybe too slowly, or maybe too arid, for my taste, to become suddenly so cute, and not only cute, everything on the screen was real time, I was following breathlessly the adventures of the little girl, to find out, exactly at the end, that the movie was about something else.The White Balloon - you get the meaning of the title only in the last scene, after all movie was about getting the money, loosing and then trying to recuperate them to buy a goldfish.This movie is not only deceptive, it has multiple levels of deception.The author of the screenplay is Abbas Kiarostami, and the way it starts looks like a movie by Kiarostami about children (along with grown-ups not understanding the little ones). Where is the Friend's Home comes to mind immediately, only this is beguiling. Here the grown-ups, as estranged from the natural of children as they can be, are eventually willing to help.Also the little girl is not faultless either. Actually she is a pest. Anything bad that comes is due to her only. She is greedy, cunning, desperate, spoiled. That's it. While she is cute. Well, because all kids her age are the same way: greedy, cunning, selfish, desperate, spoiled; a pest, while extremely cute. That's why we love them.Is it then a nice comedy about a cute girl who desires a goldfish? Not exactly, that's just another level of deception.As it comes to the end, we realize the remarkable wholeness of this movie: a close space, just a couple of streets, a very short period of time, just a couple of hours, just a few personages, confined to this small space and time. Each one (not only the girl) is acting somehow frenetically, and the resulting whole is a crazy small universe, absurdly self-sufficient.These people are acting totally unaware of each other, except when it happens to collide; in these particular situations they fight or cooperate, or do the both, then again each one is unaware of others' presence.There is however a boy who's the exception, a stranger (an Afghan immigrant)... but you should watch the movie to get it.

sammy The White Balloon is a movie which banks upon it's unbelievably simple story and settings. Shot almost entirely in just about three locations within a locality the movie comes across as a beautifully made spectacle of new wave cinema .The Director does well to capture the moments in lens which come from the actors in the movie (almost all of them are children).Natural acting and a delectable plot mark the movie.It is sometimes quite incredible to note how such a beautiful movie comes out of a painfully simple plot, a plot which reminds us of short stories from our primary school days.No scope for melodrama or extravagance Mr. Panahi quite ably illustrates that big budgets , exquisite locations and highly paid actors are not needed to make Exceptional movies. Movie which will stay with you for ever. Simple is Beautiful.