Shahid-Saless's first feature, set in a southern coastal province of Iran, is "a day in the life" of a young boy deprived of parental love. The son of an illegal fisherman and an increasingly ill mother, he goes to school every day but is hopelessly lost in its militaristic teaching system. And every day he returns home to sell his father's meager catch and bring the earnings to the bar where the man is drinking and dreaming his life away. The boy's "home" is a corner of the family's one-room house which he lovingly prepares for the next day's routine. He faces it all with the smile of resignation, but the "simple event" of the film's title-the mother's death-is looming. It will usher him into an unkind adulthood. Shot in a semidocumentary style, this classic of Iranian cinema served to denounce both the exploitation of abandoned children and the exploitation of the filmgoing public, ushering in the art cinema of the seventies.