Critics reviews

[The White Balloon] resists sentimentality, instead cultivating an instinctive empathy by aligning us with [the child protagonist's] perspective... [and] floats delicately between narrative and nonfiction.

The White Balloon reinvents time and our moment-to-moment perception of it, an accomplishment that’s anything but slight. To say that Panahi has served up the universe in a teacup makes the film sound overblown and pretentious, and it’s anything but. Yet it certainly is a universe... that taught me a lot more about the flow of time in everyday life than anything I’ve seen lately from Hollywood.

Jafar Panahi’s experience of working with Abbas Kiarostami is evident. Most of the movie is captured using fixed shots supplemented by some pan shots. This has effortlessly captured the life and people of Tehran in the nineties... The “White Balloon” is one to enjoy and cherish.

Tethering the movie to the child's point of view (both literal and metaphorical), Panahi absorbs us so entirely into his heroine's delicate, enquiring world, that the loss of her money and her separation from her brother create an atmosphere of suspense as gripping as that of any Hitchcock thriller.

The film is a strong example of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema and for students of Iranian film and the work of Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami, who wrote the script, it is essential viewing.

The White Balloon shows us the world through Razieh’s wide eyes... Like The Circle, [the film] literalizes Panahi’s philosophy in the formal choices of its opening... [in which] we see almost all of the characters that Razieh will subsequently come across in her winding path.

[The White Balloon] is a vivid exercise in transforming the problems of everyday life into a movie experience. Panahi's study of the minutae of life is actually quite extraordinary.

Panahi brings a beguiling humour, poetry and strangeness to this tiny, everyday story. Apart from emotions of suspense, frustration and relief, the film conveys, above all, a truly magical sense of encountering places and people through a child's eyes. But make no mistake, there is a great deal of dread mixed into this magic.

An exquisitely crafted debut feature, Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon is a compelling tribute to the aesthetic merits of simplicity... The film so imaginatively inhabits the macro mindset of a seven-year-old, for whom the tiniest setback is a momentous hurdle, as to bring high drama and a delicious humor to every step of her single-minded journey.

If I didn't know the movie was critically acclaimed, I'd have no hesitation whatever calling it a long, dull story about an irritating child.

Tiny [and] improbably charming... Panahi's methods are so effective, in fact, that there's reason to wish his film had more of a destination... As the story unfolds in real time until the dawn of the new year, the film finally loses momentum and falls back upon the open-ended, anecdotal manner of a short story. Still, it's a short story that can be enjoyed intently all the way through.

By turns suspenseful and amusing, [this] deceptively slight tale is a charmer with lots of local color... [Panahi] parlays careful casting and the most basic raw ingredients into a modest slice of life with near-universal appeal.