Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi's entry into the world of a blind boy, a triumph of humility and empathy. The boy's openness to the world around him in contrast to his father's insulation from it is a constant theme: the soundtrack, in one instance, quiets down to just the distant birdcall that brings a private smile to the boy's face while his father is caught up in doing business, completely oblivious to his child's source of delight. Which of them is blind? Which is more alive? A simple truth, simply illustrated, and copiously. The movie is very sensuous in its sounds (the rhythm of a woodpecker interrupted by a snorting horse) as well as in its imagery: the tactility of rocks in a stream, a field of grain, wildflowers. Majidi upholds the unfashionable humanist tradition in cinema (marvelous faces on the blind boy, the sullen father, the crinkly granny), but he does so with enormous formal precision, besides, and poetic imagination (the rising fog bank that signals the ebb of life). Like the same director's Children of Heaven, like Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon from the same spot on the map, this is a movie about children, but quite unlike those others, it is not also for them. There is no pair of sneakers, no goldfish, no tangible reward, at the finish line -- not in this world, anyway. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.