With talk of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its fundamental regime abound in the media these days, it is easy to see the nature of the country as represented by its government, something I feel people in this world do too often. In a more perfect world, countries would be defined by its people and their values, not by whatever government happens to be ruling them at the moment – a realization I’ve come to over the past five years as an American.

That is why the Iranian film “Children of Heaven” is such an important movie for you, me, and President Bush to see. In the neorealist tradition, it reminds us that people everywhere are just that: people. They have nothing to do with their government’s nuclear ambitions, its corporate corruption, or its illegal wars and secret torture camps. People everywhere are just as honest, just as hard-working, and just as flawed as people anywhere else.

The film begins as Ali (Amir Farrokh Hashemian), a nine year-old boy, is picking up his sister Zahra’s (Bahare Seddiqi) recently repaired shoes from the shoemaker. Ali is out running errands for his mother, and also stops to buy some bread and vegetables. Here we learn that his family is not doing very well, as the clerk complains to Ali that his family’s tab is full, and they must pay at least some of it. As Ali is making his purchase, a garbage man mistakenly picks up the bag with Ali’s sister’s shoes in them.

Ali goes home and admits to his sister that he has lost her shoes, but he promises to find them. Until then, he tells her, she can wear his shoes to school. He begs her not to tell their parents – their mother is ill and their father is short-tempered and hard-working – it would only lead to a beating. She doesn’t tell and the two manage to keep the secret from their parents, exchanging shoes halfway between school and home everyday.

Like Di Sica’s classic “The Bicycle Thief,” the film is about what great odds people will go to in order to get something that to slightly wealthier audiences seems trivial. The loss of a bicycle would be disappointing for most Americans, but we would be able to recover. The loss of damaged and dirty shoes would not be a great loss at all for most American girls, but to Zahra and Ali, it represents the well-being of their family.

Several of the scenes and plot devices are borrowed from the Di Sica movie, including one in which Zahra discovers a girl who is now wearing her shoes, but upon seeing where she lives, realizes the girl is even worse off than herself. The focus of the movie then turns to Ali’s efforts to find new shoes for Zahra, culminating in, surprisingly, one of the most intense foot-race scenes I have ever seen.

The real delight of the movie is the little girl who plays Zahra, Bahare Seddiqi. The children actors of Iran seem to be much more talented than any we have here (yes, I’m including both Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning), and this little girl is so cute and expressive that you can’t help but fall in love with her. As an older brother as close in age to my little sister as Ali seems to be to his, I noticed how well writer/director Majid Majidi captured the dynamics of a close sibling relationship – and how much Zahra’s attitude toward her brother reminded me of my sister as a tyke.

Though it is probably not what the Majidi was aiming for, the main effect this has on American audiences is that which I mentioned earlier – that it reminds us that people in Iran are people, too. They’re not just rioters who get mad about cartoons, they’re not fundamentalist extremists, and they’re not terrorists. By my count, God was only mentioned once in the film, and that was when Ali’s father said “Thank God.” Religion is obviously part of their life, as it is in so many Westerner’s, but it is not, as people seem to think, the only thing they spend their time on. They live a life just as diverse and, at times, harrowing as ours.