Color of Paradise

In THE COLOR OF PARADISE, an eight-year-old boy named Mohammed attends a school for blind children in Tehran. When summer vacation arrives, the parents of the other children arrive to take them home. Mohammed's widowed coal worker father, Hashem, however, arrives hours late, then asks a teacher if Mohammed can stay at the school permanently. When his request is refused, Hashem takes his son on a cross-country journey to their family home in northern Iran. While Hashem is dour and visibly burdened, Mohammed's senses are overloaded with the sounds, scents, and textures of the lush natural surroundings along the way. At the family farm, Mohammed is reunited with his two young sisters and his adoring Granny, with whom the young boy has a spiritual bond. When Hashem is given the chance to marry a young woman from a strict Islamic family, he worries that his son will destroy his chance of approval from her family, so he sends the boy off to a remote part of Iran to be a carpenter's apprentice. Initially, the b...