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Film by Jaime Frederick The Color of Paradise starring Mohsen Ramezani, Elham Sharifi and Hosein Mahjoob directed by Majid Majidi opens Friday, June 30 The Globe The renewed interest in Iranian cinema that has developed internationally in the last decade or so, has led to much discussion of the tendency of many Iranian films to focus on the lives of children without necessarily being films for children. Due to the fact that Iranian censorship laws are very prohibitive of political and social commentary, many Iranian filmmakers choose to avoid including potentially circumspect subject matter that could prevent not only the exhibition but also the production of their films. This is one of the reasons that films like Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The White Balloon and Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven have young children as their protagonists – in some way, the focus on children allows the directors to explore some of the least glorious aspects of Iranian life, subjects that might otherwise be snipped by the censor’s scissors or even banned outright. In his latest film, The Color of Paradise, Majidi has again cast a child in the central role. A young blind boy, Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani), returns home to his family in Northern Iran following a year in Tehran at a special school for blind children. It becomes clear that the boy’s father (Hosein Mahjoob) resents the additional emotional and financial burden his son’s blindness represents for him, and if it weren’t for Mohammad’s sisters and doting grandmother, the boy might have been abandoned long ago. Since he can’t see, Mohammad can’t work the land like his other siblings, nor has he been encouraged to attend public school with them. To his self-pitying father, Mohammad is a liability in an already impoverished life. Once this central conflict has been established, Majidi sets out to reveal the different ways Mohammad experiences the world, and this is truly wondrous filmmaking. If cinema, at its best, can show us new ways of seeing, Majidi has taken his sensory exploration one step further. With the simplest means available, Majidi and his young star, Ramezani, guide us through a world of tactile, olfactory and auditory experience with a degree of sensitivity that genuinely prompts the viewer to feel things differently with all the senses at one’s disposal, and to consider the various textural qualities that we sighted folk so often take for granted in our image-based society. Even if Majidi strays slightly too far into the sentimentality that was also present to a lesser degree in Children of Heaven, his ability to make his audience reconsider their experiences are enough to recommend this film. Although the resolution of the parent/child conflicts at the heart of the story will seem cloying to some, it is still at least partially respectful of the ambiguities of shared experience. If anything, The Color of Paradise tells us to tolerate each other’s differences, to accommodate them as best we can, and to learn most from those who are least like us.

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