| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Movie Name | The Color of Paradise (1999) |
| Director | Majid Majidi |
| Writer | Majid Majidi |
| Lead Actor | Mohsen Ramezani |
| Cast | Mohsen Ramezani, Hossein Mahjoub, Salameh Feyzi, Farahnaz Safari, Elham Sharifi |
| Genre | Drama, Family |
| Release Date | April 1, 1999 (Iran) |
| Duration | 1h 30m |
| Budget | $1 million |
| Language | Persian |
| IMDb Rating | 8.2/10 |
This poetic Iranian film (subtitled in English) is about a blind boy who wants to live a normal life and a poor, desperate father who considers him a hopeless burden. The locale is a picturesque countryside we rarely see (given our geographical and political distance from Iran). It has a Bible like conflict between good and evil in which God, while unseen, plays a key role.
Mohammad, the bright and sensitive eight year old, has been at a school for the blind in Tehran. But he yearns for the summer at home where the country blossoms with color and life birds, fields of grain and wildflowers, misty mountains, woods, whitewater rivers and seashore. He hears them and feels them with his hands. He also cherishes his sisters and nurturing, kindly grandma.
But his widowed, self pitying dad, scratching out a primitive living making charcoal, is focused on arranging a profitable new marriage. He plans, somewhat guiltily, to give the boy away to a blind carpenter in a distant village the loving, prayerful Granny is opposed to this.
The director, Majid Majidi, previously made Children of Heaven, the first Iranian film nominated for an Oscar. Color is an allegory about the sacredness of life. It is Bergmanesque in its ominous use of nature and weather, and its suggestion of the reality that is everywhere and beyond the merely visible.
Majidi conveys the idea that this little boy, through his ears and hands, as well as joy in life, is close to touching what we cannot see. The dramatic final sequence, implying (however understated) a divine response, as well as the love that holds together the universe, recalls the ending of Bergman’s great Virgin Spring.
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