ramesh ramakrishnan iyer A very good movie. The actors and the director have done an awesome job. The photography is pure poetry. The places and the locations are very evocative. The story is very deep. It makes you see the world with totally different eyes. A simple plot of a blind man regaining his sight is turned into into a masterpiece of emotions. Some scenes in the movie are really powerful and are there to stay within you, deep inside. Yusef the hero of the film is a strong character. Depite his blindness, as a professor he has done a lot and won the respect and the hearts of the people. But when he gets his sights back the world around him is totally different and he struggles even more. He is not able to cope with what he sees and his image of his wife and the family and his mother all confuse him. He finds his friends wife attractive and becomes obsessed with meeting her and hearing her voice etc. The scenes depicting Yusef's desires and the confusion are a marvel in direction and acting. There are some over dramatic elements in this movie that could have been avoided but even those scenes have a point in touching the viewer a bit deep and making the point. All in All a superb film. Makes one wonder

martonejames I have been deeply moved by "The Willow Tree," which I saw this evening as part of an Iranian film series at the Freer Gallery in Washington DC. I am not sure that any Western culture could ever produce something as beautiful, but I hope all westerners see it. It has impressed positively and permanently. I was most moved by the scene of the hero coming back to Iran, and seeing his mother, and then again, when the mother comes to his house after his wife has left. The most beautiful, was our hero looking for the papers in the pond, and finding that special one. The ending is magnificent, as it allows us to ponder which is better, to continue blind, or be blessed again with sight. But in either case he seems condemned. Thank you. James

Carl Cinema began as a purely visual medium. The shock and fright that the Lumière brothers caused in their virgin audience came about because seeing the world through the lens of a camera is like seeing for the first time—witness Dziga Vertov's 1929 paean to the new medium, Man With a Movie Camera, and you get a sense of this fascination. Thus, film is perfectly suited to director Majid Majidi's exploration in The Willow Tree of a blind man regaining his sight. After a quietly foreboding passage of voice-over, the movie opens its eyes on a scene of sylvan innocence, with a father and his young daughter racing sticks down a stream. We soon learn that the father, Youssef, a university professor, is blind. At home, his wife, Roya, sits and translates pages of texts into Braille for him. When he sits down to read them in his courtyard, a sudden gust of wind blows them away and Roya has to scramble across the garden to retrieve them, while Youssef grasps desperately at whatever he can feel near him. He is cared for, he is loved, and loves in return but we are given a sense of his dependence, his powerlessness in the face of nature's occasional rushes. Having flown to Paris to treat a possible cancer under his eye, he undergoes a cornea transplant that should restore his sight, which he lost when he was 8 years old. In a tremulously powerful section of the movie, Youssef impatiently peels back the padding around his eyes to the shocking sensation of light. Still with the carefully lifted feet of a blind man, he pads excitedly into the hospital corridor as a single tear of blood falls from his still- scarred eyes. It is a moment of subtle horror—after all, a new sense is terrifying. The Willow Tree is unrelenting cinema. It challenges our notion of perception and gives us the visceral rush of seeing as though for the first time. When Youssef returns to Iran he is greeted by a crowd of family and friends. In a scene that will stay with me for a very long time, the soundtrack drops away as Youssef looks at these faces without recognition—which one is Roya? Is it the beautiful young woman with the video camera? Youssef hopes so. And there is the tragedy—with all this renewed sensation, the reference points of the past need to be realigned, the world which satisfies the other senses might not satisfy the eyes, and in that moment at the airport, Majidi brings to bear both the revelatory joy of the new and the plummeting realisation of how much was lacking before. As Youssef, Parviz Parastui is astonishing. It is his performance, as well as that of Afarin Obeisi as his mother, that lifts The Willow Tree above anyone reproaching it with sentimentality. It is a deeply religious film, in the best sense of the word—a moral fable that is not moralistic.

corrosion-2 This film can be described as a companion piece to Majidi's highly acclaimed Color of Paradise. In that movie, in which a father saw his blind son as a burden and not as a blessing, we (& eventually the father) began to "see" the world from the blind boy's view and in doing so saw a much richer, meaningful world. Here, the characters of the father and the son are embodied in a single person: Yusef who after 38 years of being blind regains his sight. What he sees, however, is quite different to what he "saw" as a blind man, and not necessarily more beautiful or rewarding. Majidi takes the viewer to a higher, more spiritual world and in doing so creates another masterpiece. Majidi's movies are visually stunning and have such a profound effect on the viewer that when we leave the cinema, we see the world in a different light. Parviz Parastoui, one of the best actors in the Iranian cinema and theatre, is outstanding as Yusef. Also worth mentioning is Mahmood Kelari's exceptional photography. As in all Majidi films, there are scenes which will stay with you long after the movie is over.