Toothache (film)

Toothache (Persian: دندان‌ درد, romanized: Dandan dard) is a 1980 Iranian short educational film written, directed and edited by Abbas Kiarostami. It is also known as Dental Hygiene (Persian: بهداشت دندان, romanized: Behdasht-e dandan) which has led to some confusion and resulted in the film being listed under the latter title as an additional entry in some online filmographies, e.g. on IMDb.

Shot on 16mm, Toothache is the tenth of the 12 pedagogical short movies that Kiarostami made at the film-making department of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon) between 1970 and 1982. The film, concerned with teaching children why they must care for their teeth and brush them regularly, "is certainly the longest, the most didactic in tone and the most highly structured of all Kiarostami's shorts." To illustrate its point, the film contains ten animated shots, handled by Abdollah Alimorad and Mehdi Samakar, showing, among other things, little green tooth trolls pickaxing holes in a number of teeth. Toothache is, however, not the first of Kiarostami's Kanoon films to use animation—that was So Can I (Persian: منم میتونم, romanized: Manam mitunam, 1975).