“The Colour of Paradise,” a 1999 Iranian film directed by Majid Majidi, will be screened today at the Nanan Bhashar Nanan Chhobi festival at the International Digital Cultural Archive of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy at 6pm.
The film is about a blind boy. Quick and gentle, in love with knowledge, acutely attuned to the world around him, Mohammad loves his lessons at a school for the blind. He is loved at home by his grandmother and his two sisters. But his father, Hashem, does not love him. Hashem is a widower, ambitious to marry into a prosperous family, and he fears the possession of a blind son will devalue him in the marriage market.
Majid Majidi’s work feels truly intended for God’s glory, unlike so much “religious art” that is intended merely to propagandise for one view of God over another. His film looks up, not sideways. In this and his previous film, the luminous Oscar nominee “Children of Heaven,” he provides a quiet rebuke to the materialist consumerism in Western films about children.
