The Silence

Khorshid is ten years old and blind. He lives in a town in Tajikistan with his mother, and the landlord wants the rent. The boy works in an instrument workshop, tuning by ear, and it is the family's only income. But he cannot get to work: he follows every sound he hears on the way. He hears music and gets off the bus, follows a voice and is lost, and is late every day. Mohsen Makhmalbaf writes and directs. It was shot in Tajikistan. The idea at the centre is hearing taking the place of sight. The narrative is not a plot but a record of perception; the camera follows what Khorshid hears and the city is built as sound. The opening of Beethoven's Fifth is a motif that returns; the boy hears that rhythm everywhere and finds it in ordinary noise. The use of colour is unusual. Red, yellow and blue are deliberately oversaturated and the image is composed almost as a painting, a deliberate contrast in a film built on a child who cannot see. Makhmalbaf made this while his daughter Samira was also making films, and the family established a line of its own in Iranian cinema in those years. It runs about seventy five minutes with very little dialogue. Who it is for: viewers who like Iranian cinema and experimental films built on sound. Who it is not for: there is almost no narrative, it repeats, and the film arrives nowhere.