A Song of Sparrows

Edinburgh International Film Festival has moved forward in the year to June and it was great to start my personal experience of the festival with such a good film! The Song of Sparrows is an Iranian tale of an ostrich farm worker who is sacked when an ostrich runs away and then himself runs off to the city to try his luck in finding work. He finds himself accidentally becoming a cycle taxi and courier service and picking up lots of junk furniture to recycle. However he becomes so obsessed with his junk that he starts to forget his family and is surprised to find his son and his friends successfully cleaning out the old abandoned water storage building so it becomes a home for doves and new fish. The film is a wonderfully humourous meditation on human nature, greed and family. It's also beautifully filmed with some gorgeous visual moments - like the fish falling out of a barrel and wriggling into a drainage ditch. I would hope this film will get a release into independent and arthouse cinemas in the UK in about a year or 18 months so look out for it....