Nine-year-old Yahya (Parsa Maghami) and his best friend, Leyla (Helia Mohammadkhani), scramble over the local rubbish dump, foraging for recyclable plastics in exchange for a handful of change. When he’s not grafting to support his widowed mother, Yahya is passionate about movies, devouring the bootleg DVDs lent to him by Saber (Hossein Abedini). Then he makes two discoveries: one is an Oscar statuette, mislaid on the outskirts of his village. The other is the secret cinema history of the owner of the recycling business, once a globally recognised actor.
The Persian-language film is set in Iran but is a British production – director Hassan Nazer lives in Scotland – and was the UK submission for the international category of the Oscars last year. Storywise it’s a slip of a thing, but it gains considerable appeal from its young, non-professional cast.
