In the absence of the father, members of a family are obliged to manage their lives.

A story about the children from south of Iran, Children of Petroleum shows efforts of a family earning their livings in the absence of the father.

The 11-year-old son of the family resists against the cruelty which threatens the family and his sister.

Cast: Milad Rezai, zar Khosravi, asrin Boustan, amide Bakhtiari, Parinaz Khoshe, Milad Shadi

A Summary on Oil Children

The story is set in the 1960s before the nationalisation of petroleum and when foreign countries exploited much of Iran's oil.

The country's first oil well was in Masjed-e-Suleyman, the town where we had the location shooting.

In those days, every time a well was made, all the land in the surrounding area was bought by petroleum companies to accommodate their staff.

This operation shut other people out of this land, but those who had originally lived there built their houses in secret and rebuilt them repeatedly if they were destroyed. That is why the family in the film stealthily repairs the wall of their house at night.

Fortunately, petroleum was nationalised after all. Today's Iran doesn't necessarily depend on this industry, but I think we should keep in our minds how people suffered from the exploitation of natural resources. We still have dark memories of hard times making ends meet despite of walking across oil wells, a sea of a fortune.

Without oil, people would have spent a happier life. It was a shame in a sense that they walked over oil, and not stood firm on the soil with their own feet.

There is a scene full of tension where the boy does ropewalking on an oil pipeline which runs across a valley which is almost 40 meters high. There was a question from the audience whether the boy really crossed - of course, he did. As a matter of fact, he usually runs on the pipeline.

So, it was quite a job to instruct him not to run but to slowly walk on it while pretending to be scared. Actually, other children were also doing nothing but running on it during breaks in the filming.

During the time we tried to shoot the scene from varied angles, the crews got so scared that they, excluding the cinematographer, were unable to keep their eyes from looking below.

Regarding a festival shown in the film, it's a memorial day of a religious leader who was killed about 1,400 years ago. Even today, we darken the inside of the house and light candles on the anniversary night of his death which is called "the night we lost our father" to remember the great man.

I tried to overlap the sad atmosphere of the festival with the lonely, miserable feeling of the boy, Ismail, who doesn't know what to do with the absence of his real father. One more symbolic depiction I chose to make is the scene where the children were chased by a military policeman on his bike after sneaking away from the English camp.

There, you can see youngsters celebrating the sad festivity across the river, but it looks like a demonstration with the flags raised in their hands. It shows how young people rose and went into the revolution some years later.

I've devoted myself to make films which give hopes to every child through depicting the problems surrounding them. I hope to continue presenting issues of what kind of society children would confront or struggle with when they grow up.

Summary taken from https://www.focus-on-asia.com