Blindness

People in a city begin going blind. The afflicted are shut into a quarantine camp. The one person inside who can see is a doctor's wife; she tells nobody and watches the society inside collapse from beginning to end. Fernando Meirelles directed, from José Saramago's 1995 novel. Julianne Moore plays the doctor's wife and Mark Ruffalo the doctor. Saramago withheld the rights for years and said why plainly: it is a violent book about social degradation and rape. Producer Niv Fichman and screenwriter Don McKellar visited him in the Canary Islands and convinced him they understood the source. Filming took place in São Paulo, Guelph and Montevideo on a 25 million dollar budget. It opened the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008. The reception was harsh. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 44 percent. Roger Ebert called it one of the most unpleasant films he had ever seen; Peter Bradshaw defended it as an intelligent, tightly constructed adaptation. In the United States major blind advocacy organisations including the National Federation of the Blind protested its portrayal of blind people and planned pickets across 21 states. Saramago dismissed the objections. Who it is for: viewers who like dystopian allegory and difficult films. Who it is not for: most people. It dwells at length on rape and humiliation, and some of the objections were fair.