Why you can trust 12DOVE
School's out for summer, so eight-year-old blind boy Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani) travels with his widower father (Hosein Mahjoob) to the family home in the mountains. He's unconditionally loved by his granny (Salameh Feyzi) and two sisters, but dad thinks Mohammad's disability is an obstacle in his own plans to remarry.
Majidi's follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Children Of Heaven is a beautiful work that plays ideas of visual and spiritual blindness against each other without becoming over-complicated. Although the film builds towards an intensely moving climax, it never uses young Mohammad's plight for quick and easy sentimentality. Instead, his finely-tuned senses of touch and hearing afford him a joyful appreciation of the world around him, and the seeing audience come to believe their perceptions are dull by comparison.
With its emotional power, unaffected acting and deceptively simple storyline, The Colour Of Paradise is up there with Bicycle Thieves as an instantly accessible foreign-language masterpiece.
The Total Film team are made up of the finest minds in all of film journalism. They are: Editor Jane Crowther, Deputy Editor Matt Maytum, Reviews Ed Matthew Leyland, News Editor Jordan Farley, and Online Editor Emily Murray. Expect exclusive news, reviews, features, and more from the team behind the smarter movie magazine.

Ex-Bethesda dev turned indie says "good things often happen by accident," like that time Skyrim players convinced themselves the RPG's foxes were leading them to treasure

Palworld dev says the studio went dark for months because "the team was getting burnt out from all the social media stuff, I was getting burnt out, our CEO was under attack in Japan"

Metaphor: ReFantazio had to dial back an early battle system inspired by a notoriously brutal 2003 JRPG, because 20 years later, players found it "irrational" and "just not fun"