And a Child Shall Lead Them…
The Color of Paradise and The Children of Heaven
Prashant Murti
July 1, 2000
A nineteen-year-old took the jury prize for direction at Cannes this year, making her one of the youngest to ever receive one of the film festival's top awards. Quite a feat in itself, especially for a female director, and all the more amazing when one realizes that the director in question, Samira Makhmalbaf, is from Iran, a nation where clerical censorship of all media has been in effect since the 1979 revolution, and where it's a matter of heavy social debate whether women should be allowed to drive cars, let alone direct films about minority insurgents. Her film, The Blackboard (Takhte Siah), is a documentary drama shot on location in Kurd-populated areas of Iran. Totalitarian regimes and religious oligarchies have, as a rule, produced some of the modern world's most grandiose and uninteresting art. But for the past decade or so, filmmakers in Iran have quietly been making some of the world's finest cinema. Samira and her father Mohsin Makhmalbaf have been at the center of this renaissance, along with directors Majid Majidi and Dariush Mehrjui. As their work has slowly surfaced in festivals and theaters recently, it has challenged many of the standard Western perceptions about Iran. With the widespread American release of two of Majid Majidi's most recent films, both tight-focused fables of the lives of children, having one's presuppositions challenged was never so wonderful. The Color of Paradise begins in a school for the blind in the center of Tehran's urban sprawl, where a young boy, Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani, in a stunning performance), waits for his father to fetch him home for the school holidays. Mohammad's father Hashem (Hossein Mahjub), an earnest but embittered widower, eventually arrives and escorts his charge ...
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