The Father (1996)

Directed by Majid Majidi, who would later helm the better known Children of Heaven, this Iranian film is set in a working class milieu, and it tells the story of a teenage boy, who after his father is killed in a traffic accident, has to leave school and start working in order to support his family. He is proud of being, at such a young age, the person bringing the bread to his poor family. But things change when his widowed mother marries a police officer. He regards this as a double betrayal, and he tries to make life for his family impossible. After putting his two young sisters in jeopardy (in a domestic oven, in one of the film's best scenes), he flees to a port city. The policeman follows him, and in the road back they found themselves in the desert, in a final chase scene that is among the best thing I ever saw. Eventually, and in extremis, adoptive father and son reconciles. Perhaps the best thing of the movie is the portrayal of the policeman. His manners are a bit rough and unpolished, but in his heart he is a good man; it would have been much easier for the film to portray him as a monster, but happily this was avoided. Another triumph for the humanistic Iranian cinema that surprised the movie-watching world in the 1990s (and which sadly, right now, seems to be going through a bad time, hurt by renewed censorship in the Islamic republic).