Cultural Correspondent
A three-day film festival concluded at the TSC Auditorium on the Dhaka University campus on Thursday afternoon.
With the theme ‘Nature is Life’, the Dhaka University Film Society (DUFS) and the National Autistic Forum have jointly arranged the festival.
A total of 12 films- ‘Colour of Paradise’, ‘Benny and Joon’, ‘Snake’, ‘The Width Day’, ‘Inside I Am Dancing’, ‘Temple Grading’, ‘Men of Honour’, ‘Barfi’, ‘Behanga’, ‘Radio’, ‘Rain Man and Forest Gump’- were screened at the festival.
“The Color Of Paradise” an Iranian film depicting the feelings of a 8-year-old blind boy, Mohamed, was perceived as the most memorable movie of the festival.
Mohammad, placed in a special school in Tehran, was left alone when the other kids have been collected by their families for the long summer holidays. Eventually Mohamed’s father turns up, and they make the long journey back to the farm where Mohamed’s aged grandmother and his sisters pick flowers and extract the dye for wool. Mohammad’s mother died earlier and the father wants to re-marry where Mohamed was considered a liability.
Thus the story goes on and the boy survives in a natural catastrophe giving his father a sense of deep gratitude to the Almighty.
The beautiful film produced by Majid Majidi is yet another Iranian movie about the world of children. The story may be small, but the emotions are vast – scenes like the one in which the blind boy rescues a baby bird which has fallen from its nest resonate with simple beauty. The climax, featuring a swollen river and a rickety bridge, is nail-biting stuff. Mohsen Ramezani, the child actor, is astonishing.
This award-winning film from Iran has, like most films from that country, an ability to immerse itself in an impressive credibility and in the texture of its culture. From the braille lessons through the young boy’s painstaking saving of a baby bird, to the feeding of the chickens at his grannie’s home and the reading of the wheat, this film is marked by the texture of detail, amazing performances and a stunning climax.
Iran is currently producing some of the best cinema in the world and this is an example of that, the admirers say.
Source: Weekly Holiday
