Majid Majidi’s Midday Meal has won the top prize at the Busan Film Festival, according to Variety. The recognition brings attention to a drama whose central dilemma is painfully practical: a teacher needs his students to stay in school, but keeping them there means finding the money to feed them.
That premise makes the film worth considering beyond its award. Education promises a future; hunger demands an answer today. Between those competing timescales stands a man whose desire to help is tangled up with his own need for security.
Spoiler notice: This character analysis discusses story developments described in published festival coverage. It offers an interpretation of those accounts, rather than a firsthand assessment of the finished film’s performances or pacing.
A teacher with something personal to lose
Mohammad Rahimi plays Davoud, a rural schoolteacher hoping to secure permanent employment and finance a home for himself and his mother. When the benefactor supporting the school’s lunches dies, the meals stop and attendance suffers. His professional future and his students’ immediate welfare become inseparable. These circumstances are detailed in [CINE 21’s festival account](https://www.biff.kr/eng/artyboard/mboard.asp?Action=view&intSeq=103146&strBoardID=9611_27).
My reading is that this overlap gives the story its strongest moral foundation. Wanting a secure job does not invalidate Davoud’s concern for children. It makes his concern harder to separate from fear. Every effort to preserve the classroom can serve several purposes at once: helping pupils, protecting his mother, and rescuing the life he has imagined.
A less demanding story could make its teacher entirely selfless. Here, the more useful question is whether generosity has to be pure before it counts. Most people cannot detach their responsibilities from their hopes. A school can be both someone’s vocation and the institution that pays his bills.
From the children’s perspective, lunch is part of learning
Elizabeth Kerr’s festival review describes pupils who depend on the school meal, with some carrying leftovers home. She also identifies a disturbing development: Davoud turns away children willing to forgo lunch if they can remain in his crowded classroom. Those details come from [Screen International’s account](https://www.biff.kr/eng/artyboard/mboard.asp?Action=view&intSeq=103109&strBoardID=9611_23).
The distinction matters. Children may need food urgently and still want an education. Treating those needs as competing explanations for attendance would diminish them. A pupil who arrives hungry is not less curious, less deserving, or less capable of imagining a different future.
For me, the troubling possibility is that a teacher under pressure starts seeing an additional student as an additional expense. That change does not require him to stop caring. It requires him to calculate constantly. Scarcity can make the language of welcome give way to the arithmetic of capacity.
Viewers should keep that imbalance in mind when considering Davoud’s choices. Adults can debate intentions; children experience whether the classroom door opens. Their perspective provides a necessary check on any interpretation that makes the teacher’s conscience the only thing at stake.
The mother’s work belongs at the center
CINE 21 reports that Davoud and his mother leave their rented home and move into the school, redirecting rent money toward meals. Screen International describes her cooking for the children. Together, these details establish that his response depends on someone else’s sacrifice and labor.
That is an important corrective to the familiar image of the lone inspirational teacher. A meal requires preparation, serving, and cleaning. Money alone does not perform those tasks. Nor does the decision to help explain who will absorb the hours involved.
My interpretation is that the mother’s contribution complicates the meaning of devotion. Supporting a loved one can mean sharing his purpose, but it can also mean sharing consequences he has helped create. Her presence invites viewers to ask whose exhaustion becomes invisible when attention settles on the person making the decisions.
That interest in the obligations carried within families also informs our analysis of family responsibility in Coco and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, though Midday Meal approaches those obligations through immediate material needs.
Two lines expose the rules around generosity
Clarence Tsui’s review records a contact telling Davoud, “The time for good deeds is over, now I only do things for myself.” Elsewhere, a supervisor says, “Charity has its own rules.” Both lines appear in [The Film Verdict’s festival review](https://www.biff.kr/eng/artyboard/mboard.asp?Action=view&intSeq=103075&strBoardID=9611_24), which also describes the teacher spending his savings before moving toward increasingly unlawful behavior.
The first statement treats selfishness as a lesson learned. Its speaker presents withdrawal from obligation as realism. The second makes generosity sound like an administrative category, something with procedures that can be invoked without resolving the need in front of anyone.
I read the tension between these lines as an attack on moral convenience. One person excuses himself from helping; another speaks as if help can be managed at a comfortable distance. Davoud occupies the uncomfortable space between them, where a decision must become food on a plate.
Good intentions cannot settle every consequence
Screen International reports that Davoud turns to fuel smuggling to fund the lunches. That development gives his predicament a sharper edge: continuing a valuable service involves choices that carry their own moral burden.
Understanding pressure should deepen judgment, rather than end it. The useful questions are specific: who benefits, who accepts the danger, and who has any say? A sympathetic motive cannot answer all three. Equally, condemning an individual act cannot explain why maintaining an ordinary classroom has become so difficult.
This distinction between feeling responsible and becoming accountable also runs through our commentary on conviction and responsibility in Artificial. The settings differ, but both invite scrutiny of what people permit themselves to do in service of a larger purpose.
What the title asks us to notice
My deeper reading begins with the modest scale of the title. A midday meal is ordinary, recurring, and quickly needed again. Feeding someone once can become a memorable act of kindness. Feeding a classroom every day requires continuity, resources, and shared responsibility.
That makes the award-winning film’s central situation more unsettling than a simple celebration of sacrifice. A teacher can exhaust himself and still face tomorrow’s lunch. His mother can give her time without making that time unlimited. The children’s needs do not disappear when the adults have reached their limits.
Midday Meal invites a demanding kind of sympathy: concern for a flawed caregiver, attention to the people helping him, and recognition that children should not have to depend on anyone’s capacity for extraordinary sacrifice to receive an ordinary education.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 16, 2026 at 07:33:19 PDT (Los Angeles time)
