A Discourse Analysis of Majid Majidi's Movie, The Children of Heaven

Discourse analysis is possible only when a work is read by focusing on its own texture (time, place, speaking subject, and enunciatee). Majid Majidi's movie the Children of Heaven is an artistic piece with lasting impression. Its script potential and semantic system enables the enunciatee to have multiple readings based on intra-textual relationships. He can then relate the text with its texture to achieve maximum meaning. By this connection, he can have a discourse analysis or reading of the text. We assume that Majidi's work is a well-integrated narrative yielding to a unique signification. The reason for this is rooted in a different outlook of the characters involved in the story. The director has beautifully managed to depict two distinct social classes in the dominant cultural condition of Iran (focusing on the metropolis) in regard to their share of social capitals, namely wealth, power, and education, to the extent that the enunciatee can obtain maximum meaning if conducting a discourse reading. The researcher's objective, while attempting to have a dynamic discourse reading, is, therefore, to answer this question, "How are the two poles of wealth and poverty and, consequently, the cause of their approach, been depicted in the movie?"