Color of Paradise (Rang-e khoda) opens with a prayer to the "glory of God," clearly praying with camera often pointed at the sky. Iranian director Majid Majidi assures viewers that these prayers are answered with occasional boom shots and obvious gleanings of light illuminating faces or hands.

Similar to his Oscar™-nominated previous film, Children of Heaven, the focus of Color of Paradise lies on a child. Eight-year old Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezaru) attends a school for the blind in modern Tehran. School ends for a three-month summer break, and Mohammad waits for his widowed father (Hossein Majub) to pick him up. His father comes many hours after the others have left, and (unknown to Mohammad) asks the school to take care of the boy. The school is incredulous, refusing the request; reluctantly the father takes his son away from the desert region to the northern Iranian countryside, with its verdant hills, streams, and birds, where Mohammad happily greets his two sisters and grandmother (Salmeh Feizi).

The father can only think about the challenges of raising a blind boy, fearing his son will never be independent. Beyond that, he's concerned about his own needs and arranges to be married again. In Iranian culture, the man basically "courts" the parents and offers a dowry to seal the deal.

Despite his son's happiness at attending the local school with his sisters and being around his grandmother, the father determines the best option is to apprentice his son to a blind carpenter he knows. He deposits the boy there, setting up the emotional center of the film.

Heartbroken, Mohammad pours out his fears that nobody loves him and how God must have forsaken him by making him blind. The monologue is shocking in its brutal honesty, especially considering that the young boy isn't a professional actor—he's a real blind boy whom the director selected after observing a number of students in special schools for the blind.

Mohammad's blindness makes him far more sensitive in other areas, as he has correctly senses his father's emotional limitations. Mohammad physically demonstrates remarkable capacity and wisdom in other scenes—locating a baby bird and placing it back in its nest, hearing the woodpeckers talking to each other, and feeling the rocky beach sand between his fingers and "reading" the particles like Braille.

Nature plays a huge part in the ninety-minute tale. Meditatively, the camera captures the wheat and alpha fields, the grassy hillsides, tree-lined roads and streams while Mohammad "sees" the beauty around him. Sounds of woodpeckers and sea gulls bring as much meaning to Mohammad as the audiotaped songs heard at the school, and he shares the wonder. Images of helpless creatures (the abandoned baby bird, a small fish trapped in a puddle, and an overturned turtle futilely struggling to right itself) make obvious visual references to the blind boy.

Those helpless animals foreshadow a harrowing turn of nature when Mohammad's life is suddenly put in danger, leaving his father with a choice. A situation that would be automatic for most everyone, but when we realize that his father worries more for his own needs than his blind son, there's a question whether he will do the right thing for redemption. The setting is beautiful, a true natural paradise, and the father can either continue to live in his own Hell or attempt to tap into this paradise, making the grandmother's words very prophetic—she tells her son that she is much more worried about him than she is Mohammad.

The forty-three year old Majidi has written and directed about one film a year since his 1992 feature debut, Baduk. Most aren't readily available in the U.S., The Children of Heaven and Baran being the only film besides Color of Paradise released on DVD. When more film lovers discover the visual beauty of this film and continue to be haunted by its imagery, Majidi's films will surely receive more screenings in the states. I've only seen this one so far, but in many ways it reminds me of Ozu's intimate studies of Japanese family life, so I'm looking forward to checking out more of Majidi's work.