A nuanced performance by Mohammad Rahimi powers Majidi’s Busan competition premiere

Dir: Majid Majidi. Iran. 2026. 133mins

In the opening frames of director Majid Majidi’s Midday Meal, the camera glides over the jagged tops of the dusty hills of Iran’s southeastern Chabahar district – ironically not far from the Strait of Hormuz; the film later closes with a similar overhead shot of a lush vegetable garden during a minor harvest. The visual dialectic represents the drastic changes in the lives of the men doing the harvesting in a few short months, and ultimately asks: Do the ends justify the means?

Majid trains his camera on the banal and lets his fury trickle through the narrative

That’s part of the quandary a provincial teacher must contemplate when his school finds itself on the verge of closure, putting his hopes and dreams for a future as a tenured government employee in peril. Making its world premiere in Busan competition, Midday Meal is a timely film, yet also timeless in its subtle criticism of the systems and structures that make something as simple as science class such an effort.

Majidi is no stranger to the festival and awards circuits and, though he’s generally less confrontational than peers such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi or Mohammad Rasoulof, he was the first Iranian filmmaker to be nominated for an Academy Award, for 1997’s Children of Heaven. That was produced by Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (IIDCYA), which also produces here. Anchored by a nuanced, low-key frantic performance by Mohammad Rahimi, the film bears the typical deliberate pacing of Iranian cinema, and a moral and social knot for the characters to untie. Polished, engrossing and gorgeously realised in bleak-beautiful images by cinematographer (and co-writer) Houman Behmanesh, Midday Meal has potential for art house success after a healthy festival run.

Davoud Soulan (an excellent Rahimi) is a schoolteacher with about three months to go in the school term, at the end of which he’ll be made a permanent employee of the Ministry of Education. It’s a modest dream he’s been working towards for years; one he hopes will help him finance a new flat for himself and his mother, and allow him to keep his classroom in Goorankesh operating for the 42 children who rely on it. Davoud wants them to learn, but he’s keenly aware that most of them come to class purely for the free lunch. The district is poor and for many of the kids, it’s their only meal of the day; some take leftovers home to their families.

Davoud’s already precarious life is thrown into greater turmoil when the unseen benefactor who paid for the school lunches dies — the meals didn’t come from the Ministry — throwing the school’s existence into question. Neighbouring schools are already shutting down due to falling enrolment, and Davoud was relying on the steady cheque to buy his home. Increasingly desperate and with rising numbers of kids drifting into his classes, Davoud and his mother move into the school, compelling him to find a way to fund the lunch programme on his own. He does it by smuggling fuel; an operation which represents the beginning of a war of attrition of sorts, between Davoud and the forces that are trying to close the school. All the while his elderly mother helps by cooking for the kids and never challenging Davoud on his choices.

With minimal excess dialogue, naturalistic performances and an understated, entirely moving star turn from Rahimi, Majidi doesn’t dive into Iran’s authoritarian politics, instead training his camera on the banal and letting his fury trickle through the narrative. As he peels back the layers of Davoud’s personality, we learn he’s a flawed, entirely human hero, with the film’s drama sourced in the question of whether or not Davoud is a good enough man to pull himself from the brink of moral collapse.

Rahimi plays Davoud’s cards close to the chest, almost weaponising his doe eyes and sun-baked skin, just letting just enough of a crack form in his stony facade to reveal an internal struggle. Davoud turning away children who are willing to skip lunch if they can just stay in his teeming classroom makes for a quietly devastating sequence. Midday Meal may not be as fiery as Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig or as symbolically dense as Panahi’s No Bears, but it’s a graceful demonstration of frustration that speaks just as loudly.

Main cast: Mohammad Rahimi, Kheyri Zakeri, Rahim Bakhsh Pira, Heybatmorad Damani​