ISLAMABAD (Staff Report) – National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage, Lok Virsa will screen an Iranian film “The Willow Tree” by Majid Majidi here on December 5 under its Mandwa film club program.
The film is based on a resonant metaphor for life’s second chances and a powerful parable of sight and insight. The Willow Tree is a vivid imagery and emotional immediacy which makes this movie
Majid Majidi’s most mature and ambitious film to date.
The story board tells the story of Youssef, a man blinded in a fireworks accident, when eight years old. After an operation he regains his vision, changing his life in unexpected ways. It was
filmed in both Tehran and Paris.
The film served as a spiritual masterpiece on gratitude, transformation and surrender to God. When Youssef is exposed to the visual world, the beauty he encounters is compelling and frustratingly
elusive. Ugliness and strangeness is everywhere. The aggressive presence of the world gradually silences the dialogue he had with God and himself.
Majid Majidi is an Iranian director whose deeply spiritual films include Children of Heaven (1997), The Color of Paradise (1999) and Baran (2001). The Willow Tree won four awards at the 2005 Fajr Festival in Tehran. The Willow Tree is a spiritual masterpiece that deals with subjects dear to the heart of Sufis and celebrated in the poems and other writings of Rumi.
Youssef moves from a world of darkness where he relies on his senses and his connections with others to a world of light where he relies on sight and winds up falling quickly into selfishness and detachment. Youssef goes through a series of physical and emotional transformations, but it is the last one, the spiritual one, that is the most important in the film.
The Mandwa club was screening movies on every weekend to provide healthy entertainment to the fun lovers of the twin cities as well as revive the fading culture of classical cinema, said an official of Lok Virsa.
