Canterbury Film Society: The Colour of Paradise

The Canterbury Film Society will screen director Majid Majidi's The Colour of Paradise at Rialto cinema on Monday 12 April at 6.30pm.

A sightless boy sees more of God’s green earth than his sighted father can in Majid Majidi’s majestic The Colour of Paradise – another profound entry in the remarkable catalogue of contemporary Iranian films that focus on children and landscape to express yearnings for innocence and faith. The term is over for Mohammad who attends a boarding school for blind children in Tehran.

But his father, a poor widower hoping to remarry, only reluctantly takes him home to the country for the summer; who wants a blind child in the dowry? At least there Mohammad has his two affectionate younger sisters, and his adored grandmother, a warm, holy old woman whose generous love for her grandson is as reliable as the sun and wind and flowers and birds so simply, reverently photographed by the painterly filmmaker.

Majidi contrasts Mohammad’s frustration and loneliness – never more powerful than when the boy can only hear what’s around him while we can see intensely colored natural beauty – with moments of rapture when the boy, with his sensitive, searching fingers, touches leaves, water, or his patient Granny’s familiar face. (Her mottled, calloused hands, he tells her, feel white and soft.) His eyes may be useless (the untrained child actor really is blind), but Mohammad sees what’s important. And in a scene as wrenching as any more Westernized climax, the weeping boy cries out his anguish.

His father’s vision is limited, metaphorically, until tragedy washes his eyes clear. Majidi is empathetic to the older man’s own struggles; he’s also attuned to the movement of girls, aged countrywomen, and airborne seedpods, all part of a divine plan. A lot happens in The Colour of Paradise, some of it shocking. Yet while never slow, the film feels quiet and spacious, like a prayer. – Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Event listed by JonK

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