Sandra K. Friday
After seeing the film, students will draw and/or cut out of magazines we have in the room things that represent these two scenes and paste them onto the two pieces of white poster board. They can use colored pencils or felt-tip pens to finish these scenes and they can give captions to them that they think fit the scenes. It might be helpful if I model the first scene simply by drawing a pair of shoes and coloring them pink, which they are when we see them in the very first frame of the film, and perhaps, on the same board, I could draw oranges tumbling out of a basket that is tipping over or some representation of the produce falling helter-skelter in front of the produce store. By the time we have finished watching the film, they will have a piece of poster board for each significant scene with captions that they will then assemble into a visual representation of the whole story, . . . a vehicle for controlling the whole film. Ultimately, they will use this storyboard technique to help tell their own stories.
While the overriding dilemma in this poignant film is what to do about the lost shoes, the filmmaker offers moments of hope and illumination. Midway through the film, when the girls (there must be a couple of hundred) in Zahra's school are all lined up in the courtyard, Zahra spots her pink shoes on the feet of another girl several rows over from her. Once she learns where the girl lives, she and Ali, full of resolve, go to confront the girl, but, peaking from around the corner of a building, what they see dashes their hopes; the girl's father is blind and her family has even less than Ali's and Zahra's. Without even exchanging a word, they know, and the viewer knows, that the pink shoes are truly gone.
Ali holds out his last hope and experiences his ultimate anxiety in the school district race for which he struggles to qualify. Third prize is a new pair of sneakers and he promises Zahra that he will win them and trade them in on a new pair of shoes for her. In the confusion of the race, he accidentally wins, and instead of getting the new sneakers, he wins a huge trophy, and weeping, is hoisted onto the shoulders of his coach and the school principal. The media is there to record the event. Ali cannot even look at the camera. Whether using a graphic organizer, or not, this produces a major opportunity to observe the
character change
in Ali: at first, but then, and finally. Ali is no longer the naïve little boy we saw in the first scene running a few errands for his mother on his way home from school. A child growing up on anxiety!
Although Ali tried everything humanly possible, he is not able to make up for Zahra the accidental loss of her shoes. But, one of the charms of the story is that just as the film ends, the viewer sees their dad, having earned a little bit of extra money, on his way home with new shoes for both Ali and Zahra.
It would be feasible to ask students to choose from among the dozen main scenes and write about how one of these is significant to the rest of the film.