The Silence
November. 10,1999Khorshid, a blind child growing up in Tajikistan, is constantly distracted by music and sounds. This frequently causes him to be late to his job as an instrument tuner even though he runs the risk of being fired at a time when his family is in danger of being evicted from their house.
Similar titles
Reviews
hyped garbage
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.
i watched it reading a review that described it a extraordinary film . the film is nicely made but i was disappointed after watching it that what it was all about actually .plight of poor people .or the genius boy .very ordinary story line . it is just a situational story does not convey any message . the boy never mentioned his needs to his employer . like the name depicts one gets it after the completion of the movie . not worth watching . i have never watched any tajik movie before . if this is their style it need to be changed .
I saw this film when it was released, more than a decade ago, and I haven't seen it since. So I don't recall all the details. Directed by the famous Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the movie is set in the little known republic of Tajikistan. A former Soviet republic in Central Asia, Tajikistan became independent in 1991 and suffered greatly from poverty and civil war in the first years of independence (in one moving scene in the film, an elderly Russian resident of Tajikistan laments, to the point of almost crying, his economic troubles). The Tajiks are ethnically very close to the Iranians; some say that the Tajik language is just a dialect of Farsi. As shown in the film, Tajikistan seems almost frozen in time, while the movie is set in the late 1990s, a lot of the buildings and cars seem to belong to perhaps the 1950s or 1960s, the floor of most of the houses seems to be made of earth, and the factory where part of the action takes place has an abacus and an old telephone line, but not a computer (I hope that in the time since this film was made, Tajikistan has modernized a bit). The busy bazaars and narrow alleys add to the feeling of a strange place to a western viewer.The protagonist is a blind 10 year old boy, who relates to the world through sounds (the first chords of Beethoven's fifth symphony are a motif throughout the film). Coming from a very poor family, he works in a dilapidated factory tuning the instruments made there (I suppose being blind makes him more able to concentrate on the sounds). A beautiful little girl, who wears tresses and dresses in traditional multicolored Tajik clothes, seems to be his only friend. There is not much else in the movie in terms of action, I suppose that to appreciate this film you just have to sit back and enjoy what you are seeing. The amazingly beautiful color photography certainly helps. It is a poetic movie, but in a good way, unlike in other art movies, this film never feels forced or pretentious.
A little blind Tajik boy each day comes late to his job. The reason is his joy of life: The voice of around. He likes to listen to the music of nature, he likes to be as other people to see it. Unfortunately it costs high in his life. He loses his job, just because he loves music. The owner of the house where boy and his mother live tell them to free the apartment and they remain without anything. But boy continues to enjoy the life... The movie makes hearts ache. The song which I liked in this movie so much was "Charo hargiz namepursi?" (Why you never ask?) of Daler Nazarov which performed very well by Oleg Fezov. I recommend this movie to watch for all those who love the life!
This is simply the most beautiful movie I've ever seen. It revitalized all my senses. It helps to have some information about the cultural background of the movie. The fact that it takes place in Tajikistan an X-soviet republic, of Iranian ethnicity and Persian language etc.