Exclusive Trailer For Majid Majidi's "The Song of Sparrows"

A scene from Majid Majidi's "The Song of Sparrows." Image courtesy of Regent Releasing.

"Deeply humanistic" says Variety of Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi's (“Children of Heaven”, "The Weeping Willow") latest, "The Song of Sparrows," in a review that goes on to describe the film as "beautifully crafted, often sentimental, sometimes humorous."

"The Song of Sparrows" tells the story of Karim, a simple, goodhearted man who, after he loses his job at an ostrich farm, relocates to the big city where he begins working as a motorcycle taxi driver and and finds his moral fiber tested.

Echoing the praise the film has received on the festival circuit, the Hollywood Reporter says, "The story, spiked with gentle humor, moves smoothly through the standard tropes of Iranian art house cinema" and Box Office Magazine lauds the "simple, sometimes striking, beauty of cinematographer Turaj Mansuri’s imagery." Screen Daily gives the film cautious praise, calling it a "briskly likeable comedy" but notes that Majidi directs with "a soft, sometimes facile touch that quickly palls."

The film, Iran's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2008 Academy Awards, will be released by Regent Releasing on April 3, 2009.