Iranian director Majid Majidi says he originally planned to decline the Busan International Film Festival’s invitation to travel to South Korea to premiere his latest feature, Midday Meal. A gripping and heartfelt humanist parable filmed with the command of an established master, the film has since emerged as one of the standouts of the festival’s 2026 competition, with many festivalgoers calling it a front-runner for the top prize.
“This trip was very difficult for me, because I was feeling very depressed and exhausted, and I really didn’t want to leave Iran during the ongoing situation,” Majidi said in Busan. “But then, thinking that maybe my film and I could convey some kind of small message from my people to the people of other nations and other places, I decided to come.”
The director declined to describe how he made the journey from Tehran to South Korea. His visit came amid a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, reimposed in July, and sweeping September sanctions targeting Iranian aviation. Once in Busan, though, he was forceful in denouncing the civilian deaths and everyday hardships caused by the U.S. campaign against his country.
“Many Iranian civilians have been hurt and killed during this war imposed by the United States. Around 150,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed, and 156 civilians — including 120 schoolchildren — were killed when an elementary school in Minab was bombed by America,” he said. “The people of the world are watching and they understand the reality of what is true and what is wrong. I also want to tell you that the Iranian people will not bow their heads in the face of this oppression. They are a courageous and noble people, and they want to show that America should not force other nations under its control.”
A U.N. fact-finding mission said in September that it had reasonable grounds to believe U.S. forces were responsible for the Minab school strike and that the attack constituted a war crime. Donald Trump’s State Department has rejected the report’s credibility, however.
Majidi has built much of his career telling stories of children and families living on society’s margins, frequently drawing on nonprofessional performers to explore poverty and solidarity. His 1997 family drama Children of Heaven became the first Iranian film nominated for an Oscar in the best foreign-language film category (now called the best international film category). The Color of Paradise (1999) and Baran (2001) won the Montreal Film Festival’s top prize, while Sun Children competed in Venice in 2020 and earned its young star Rouhollah Zamani the Marcello Mastroianni Award.
The director’s latest, Midday Meal, follows Davoud Soulan (Mohammad Rahimi), a contract schoolteacher in Goorankesh, an impoverished village amid the remote badlands of southeastern Iran’s Chabahar region. After years of dedication to his students, Soulan is on the cusp of a better, more secure life. At the end of the school term, he expects to become a permanent government employee, which will allow him to get a loan to finally buy a comfortable apartment with a working toilet for himself and his aging mother in a nearby housing estate (he already has the unit picked out).
But like so many living on the extreme margins, his hopes rest on a precarious arrangement. For many of the children attending his school and those in surrounding villages, a free midday meal is the main incentive to come to class; and those meals — and the leftovers the kids often take home for their hungry families — are funded not by the state but by a wealthy benefactor. When the man dies early in the film and his heirs decline to continue the charity, the meals cease — and the children begin disappearing from the classroom. If enrollment collapses, Soulan risks losing both his school and the permanent position he has worked toward for years.
Thus begins a gripping, improvisational scramble to keep the school open at potentially any cost, with moral ironies at every turn. Soulan moves into the school with his mother, resolving to spend their meager savings to feed the children, preparing the meals themselves. But as neighboring schools close, more hungry pupils pour into his classroom. Does he feed them, or turn them away to preserve the fragile arrangement that could finally secure his own future?
To scrape together more food money, he resorts to cross-border fuel smuggling — illegal work, but one of the few available ways to earn quick cash. Harsher trials and deeper, parable-like ironies follow, as his desire to serve the children becomes increasingly difficult to separate from his determination to save himself.
Majidi and cinematographer Houman Behmanesh capture much of the drama with a gliding camera, often placing their protagonist against the region’s rugged, otherworldly landscape, as if viewing his all-too-human travails through the eye of an impassive and slightly rueful god. The film gradually takes on the quality of an enigmatic existentialist parable.
The Chabahar region’s eroded geologic rock formations are often called Iran’s “Martian Mountains.” Majidi said the film’s cinematography, which features numerous aerial drone shots, was directly inspired by the landscape.
“When we were scouting, I was astonished by the strange look of the area,” the director explained in Busan. “I felt that the solidity and loneliness of this man would be much more visible amid this rich and peculiar natural beauty.”
He added: “So I decided to go up [with a drone] and then look down on the people who are living in those high mountains, discovering them first from above.”
Majidi said his unusual casting process is probably more important to his work than the locations. For Midday Meal, he said, every face onscreen belongs to a nonprofessional actor — an ordinary person found through painstaking street casting in the region where the film is set.
“I have the greatest respect to the professional actors, but somehow I get the feeling that they are repeating themselves across films, and this is not my method,” he explained. “What I do is I go look for a real person who closely matches the character I have in mind. Maybe sometimes it takes months, but once I find the right person, the rest of my work proceeds very easily.”
The results are remarkably accomplished. Rahimi gives Soulan a wary, tightly contained intensity, allowing his compassion, pride and mounting panic to overlap without making his motives transparent. Opposite him, his mother (played with astonishing subtlety and grace by fellow first-timer Kheyri Zakeri) becomes the film’s deeply moving moral center. Her automatic willingness to feed others becomes a painful counterpoint to her son’s increasingly desperate calculations about whom they can afford to help — and when the ends justify the means.
Majidi said he conceived Midday Meal well before the U.S. and Israel began their war on Iran in February, but he believes the film’s resonance has grown only as the conflict has compounded the hardships facing his country’s most vulnerable citizens.
“The problem that I depict at a school — of children who don’t even have access to food — this is all directly tied to the international sanctions we have been facing in Iran for 48 years. Now there is the blockade, and we can’t even get medicine into the country, so many sick kids are suffering. These actions are felt most by ordinary Iranian people who just want to live in peace.”
He added: “The superpowers like to talk about human rights, but are they worried now about the people who are suffering for no reason?”