Jalili’s first feature Milad, that he made when he was 26, is about the teenager Milad, whose father was a railway official who was arrested for political reasons by the authorities. The film is set in 1978, just before the Revolution, during the regime of the Shah. The father is a ‘Marxist-Islamic’ and has been arrested four times before. After his latest arrest, the family is evicted from its house in Bandar Shah, in the South of the country. They leave for the North, for the capital Teheran, to seek their father and move in with Milad’s grandfather who is given a house by an Islamic charity. Milad’s mother goes to lots of prisons looking for her husband, but political prisoners are kept in a secret place and rarely see their families. Corruption is rife. Milad has to work and manages to make a living on the street. In the end the family finds the prison where the father is being held, but he has meanwhile gone blind…
The people’s dissatisfaction rumbles on in the background, theatres are burned and from the rooftops we hear the call to rebellion, ‘Allah O Akbar’ (God is Great), a slogan that eventually helped to drive out the Shah.
