He hears them and feels them with his hands. He also cherishes his sisters and nurturing, kindly grandma. But his widowed, self-pitying dad, scratching out a primitive living making charcoal, is focused on arranging a profitable new marriage. He plans, somewhat guiltily, to give the boy away to a blind carpenter in a distant village the loving, prayerful Granny is opposed to this. The director, Majid Majidi, previously made Children of Heaven , the first Iranian film nominated for an Oscar.
Color is an allegory about the sacredness of life.
It is Bergmanesque in its ominous use of nature and weather, and its suggestion of the reality that is everywhere and beyond the merely visible. Majidi conveys the idea that this little boy, through his ears and hands, as well as joy in life, is close to touching what we cannot see. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran leader and theologian who resisted the Nazis, was imprisoned and finally executed in the last days of the war for involvement in the plot to kill Adolf Hitler. His story is a natural for TV docudrama, but definitely better for PBS, because Bonhoeffer s resistance was of the mind and intellect. He was not an action hero, but an icon for intellectuals.