In the media crash course on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, Americans have been given relatively few opportunities to distinguish them from the Afghan people; perhaps as a primer for war, all have been grouped under the broad heading "Afghanistan." On the week of Sept. 11, three new Iranian films about the plight of Afghan refugees (Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Sun Behind The Moon, Abolfazl Jalili's Delbaran, and Majid Majidi's Baran) premièred at the Toronto Film Festival, just in time to offer images of their unending poverty and oppression. Though made with a compassionate eye and undeniable skill, Majidi's Baran is still a disappointment, partly because it never quite quenches this new thirst for information. Opening with a long statement about the 1.4 million Afghanis who fled to Iran after the Soviets invaded their country in 1979, the film reneges on its initial promise to show the sharp ethnic divide between illegal refugees and native Iranians in the workplace. In spite of Majidi's reputation for prodding sentiment—in some circles, he's been pejoratively labeled "Iran's Steven Spielberg"—the early scenes take a hard look at the volatile imbalance of laborers at an urban construction site. Working longer hours for less money than their Iranian counterparts, Afghans are paid under the table and forced to scatter whenever government inspectors make one of their frequent surprise visits. Their tenuous hold on even a meager livelihood become painfully clear when an old Afghani, the sole breadwinner in a family with five children, breaks his foot while on the job. After a lot of cajoling, he persuades his boss (Mohammad Amir Naji) to hire his young son (Zahra Bahrami) in his place, but it soon becomes clear that the boy is too weak to haul around the heavy cement bags. When Bahrami is shifted over to "women's work," serving the other men lunch and tea, he excels at his job but attracts the resentment of Hossein Abedini, a hotheaded Iranian teen who used to hold the position. As Abedini begins to soften toward Bahrami, courtesy of a "secret" that's more than a little predictable, so does the movie, which begins smoothing out its political edge with flavorless melodrama and precious, overwrought visual poetics. Analogous in many ways to Hollywood films that look at the black experience through the eyes of self-hating white men, Abedini's awakening to Afghan strife emphasizes the wrong side of the story. Only in the final scene, made all the more ironic and powerful by current events, does the tragedy of Afghan refugees finally register.