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The kids are all right (in moderation)
Wondering if it's time for Iran's film industry to grow up

By Roger Clarke
The Independent (London)
June 9, 2000

GREENWICH FILM Festival gets well under way today with an Iranian film of tragic pastoral gravity. The Colour of Paradise is not only the latest exquisitely made film about children to come out of that anciently theocratic environment, it's the latest calling card from the only Middle- Eastern director Hollywood looks on with anything like favour. Forty-year- old Majid Majidi had his last movie, Children of Heaven, nominated for an Oscar - only losing out to that sugared -up tilt at Mussolini's Italy, Life is Beautiful.

The sad tale of a young blind boy, Mohammed, follows him from a special school in Tehran back to his home village for the summer holidays. It's a long trip, and his father doesn't even want him, pleading with the school authorities to take Mohammed off his hands altogether. The father is preoccupied with finding a new wife and feels (not without justification, as it turns out) that any potential in-laws will consider a blind son ill-omened. He will do anything to hide his shameful secret - even finding Mohammed a job some distance away, as an apprentice to a blind carpenter whose nimble, sensitive hands somehow manage to skirt around the whining planesaws.

Perhaps it's the subject of touch that is the most revealing, and literally touching, aspect of the movie. Mohammed's endlessly questing fingertips arrange pebbles in the stream into Braille texts and trace poetic minutiae down the stems of grasses in the fields, as if the natural world were offering him words and murmurings not available to the sighted.

There are many films about children coming out of Iran - they seem never- ending. Many movies, including those of the mighty Abbas Kiarostami, feature doe-eyed tykes trotting seriously hither and thither with their earnest, childish tasks about them (vide Amir Naderi's The Runner and especially Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon). Rural locations feature heavily. According to Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, this is simply because it's "cheaper to film in rural locations and requires fewer permissions", which in turn leads to less censorship. As to the question of why so many Iranian films seem obsessed with children, it seems that this is mainly because the only serious film-school environment available to young Iranian film-makers is the state-sponsored Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.

All of Majidi's seven films (he began directing in 1992, after some years as an actor), including the one currently in post-production, seem to have been about children and teenagers. His Oscar-nominated Children of Heaven - by all accounts a semi-autobiographical tale - concerns a poor young boy who loses his sister's bright pink shoes to a blind pedlar in the alleyways of Tehran. His very first feature, Baduk (which has yet to be released in the UK), is about fatherless children sold into slavery. It's all a bit grim, as are the final scenes of The Colour of Paradise, which certainly induced a few sniffles in the cinema where I watched it.

It's difficult. As in China, the Islamic authorities in Iran take a keen interest in the morality and social responsibility of their famous sons of the cinema, and religious censorship makes any vaguely secular issue difficult to tackle. Though state interference has lessened in the past two years, even overtly religious film -makers such as Majidi must still watch their Ps and Qs. Will the future allow them to explore a different set of themes? All one wants is the chance to watch Iranian cinema grow up.

'The Colour of Paradise' is screened at the Greenwich Cinema, 7.30pm today; info: 020-8694 2218 or www.greenwichfilmfestival.co.uk

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