Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi condemns the US war after "Lunch Time" appears as a highlight of the Busan Film Festival.

The Oscar-nominated director nearly was turned away from Asia's leading film festival, but ultimately chose to attend so he could speak about the war's toll on ordinary Iranians.

Iranian director Majid Majidi says he originally intended to turn down an invitation from the Busan International Film Festival to travel to South Korea for the screening of his latest feature film, Midday Meal. A gripping and heartfelt human allegory filmed at the behest of an established master, the film has since emerged as one of the highlights of the 2026 festival competition, with many festival-goers considering it a front-runner for the top prize.

Majidi said in Busan: "This trip was very difficult for me because I felt very depressed and tired and I really didn't want to leave Iran in the current situation." But then, thinking that maybe I and my film could convey some kind of small message from my people to the people of other nations and other places, I decided to come."

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This director refused to explain how he traveled from Tehran to South Korea. His trip came amid a US naval blockade of Iranian ports, which was reimposed in July and followed by September's sweeping sanctions against Iranian aviation. However, while in Busan, he decried the civilian deaths and daily hardships caused by the US campaign against his country.

Many Iranian civilians have been injured and killed in this war imposed by the United States. About 150,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, and 156 civilians - including 120 students - were killed when the US bombed an elementary school in Minab. I also want to tell you that the people of Iran will not bow down to this oppression. They are brave and noble people and they want to show that America should not control other countries.

A UN fact-finding panel said in September that it had reasonable grounds to believe that US forces were responsible for the attack on the Minab school, and that the attack was a war crime. However, Donald Trump's State Department has denied the credibility of the report.

Majidi has built most of his work by telling stories of children and families living on the margins of society, and often uses non-professional artists to explore poverty and solidarity. In 1997, his family drama Bechahai Behesht became the first Iranian film to be nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language Film (now called Best International Film). The Color of Heaven (1999) and Baran (2001) won the top prize at the Montreal Film Festival, while Children of the Sun competed at Venice in 2020, winning the Marcello Mastroianni Award for its young star Ruhollah Zamani.

The director's latest work, Nimroz Food, is the story of Dawood Solan (Mohammed Rahimi), a contract teacher in Gorankesh, a poor village in the middle of the remote malignant areas of Chabahar in the southeast of Iran. After years of dedication to his students, the Solan area is on the verge of a better and safer life. At the end of the school term, he expects to become a permanent government employee, which will allow him to get a loan to eventually buy a comfortable apartment with a working toilet for himself and his elderly mother in a nearby housing estate (he has already chosen the unit).

But like many people living on the fringes, her hope is in a shaky order. For many children in her school and those in the surrounding villages, a free midday meal is the main motivation to come to class. And those meals—and the leftovers that kids often take to their hungry families—are provided not by the government, but by a wealthy benefactor. When the man dies early in the film and his heirs refuse to continue the charity, the meals stop—and the kids start disappearing from the classroom. If the enrollment is lost, Solan risks losing the school and the permanent position he has worked for for years.

Thus begins a gripping and impromptu scramble to keep the school open at any potential cost, with moral ironies at every turn. Solan moves into the school with his mother and decides to use his meager savings to feed the children and prepare the meals himself. But as neighboring schools close, more hungry students flock to her classroom. Will he feed them or push them away to preserve a fragile arrangement that can finally maintain order in the future?

To raise more money for food, he turns to cross-border fuel smuggling - illegal work, but one of the few ways to make quick cash. Harder trials and deeper allegorical irony follow as her desire to serve the children becomes harder to separate from her determination to save herself.

Majidi and cinematographer Homan Bahmansh capture much of the drama with a panning camera, often placing their hero against the region's rugged, otherworldly landscape, as if seeing his all-too-human toil through the eyes of a merciless, slightly sad god. The film gradually acquires the quality of an existentialist mystery allegory.

The eroded geological rocks of Chabahar region are often called the "Mars Mountains" of Iran. Majidi said the film's cinematography, which includes multiple aerial shots from a drone, was directly inspired by the landscape.

"When we were scouting, I was surprised by the strange look of the area," the director explained in Busan. I felt that the strength and loneliness of this man is much more visible in the midst of this rich and strange natural beauty.

"So I decided to go up [with a drone] and then look at the people living in those high mountains and discover them from above first," he added.

Majidi said that his unusual acting process is probably more important to his work than the locations. For Lunch, he said, every face on the screen belongs to a non-professional actor—an ordinary person found through hard-working street actors in the area where the film is set.

He explained: “I have the greatest respect for professional actors, but somehow I feel like they're repeating themselves in movies, and that's not my way. What I do is I look for a real person who exactly matches the personality I have in mind. "Sometimes it takes months, but once I find the right person, the rest of my work goes very smoothly."

The results are significantly done. Rahimi gives Solan a cautious, solid intensity, allowing his compassion, pride, and growing fear to intermingle without his motives becoming clear. Opposite him, his mother (played with surprising grace and delicacy by his first co-star Khairy Zakari) becomes the film's profoundly moral center. His automatic desire to feed others is a counterpoint to his son's increasingly desperate calculations about who can help—and when the end justifies the means.

Majidi said he envisioned Midday Meal before the US-Israeli war against Iran began in February, but he believes the film's resonance has only increased as the conflict has faced hardships facing his country's most vulnerable citizens.

The problem I'm portraying in a school—children who don't even have access to food—is directly related to the international sanctions we've faced in Iran for 48 years. Now there is a blockade and we can't even bring medicine into the country, sick children are suffering so much. These actions are mostly felt by the common people of Iran who just want to live in peace.

He added: "The superpowers like to talk about human rights, but are they now concerned about the people who are suffering for no reason?"

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