Korshid is a blind boy aged 10 who lives with his mother in a small village in Tajikistan. He works as a tuner for an instrument maker. Nadereh is his guardian and she comes to fetch him from home every day. She is his eyes and ears and leads him through the streets to his destination. Korshid is not handicapped by his blindness, far from it. Thanks to his other senses, he experiences the world around him with an intense ‘eye’ for detail. When he walks along the street and passes some girls selling bread, he can determine the quality of their wares just by feeling them. His world is also filled with sounds; he relishes the sounds that others would ignore and loses himself in the catchy harmonies of everyday life. One day he is carried away by the music of an itinerant musician – the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.The Silence was shot in a small village in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, just over the Iranian border, where the dress codes are a lot less restrictive than in Iran. Makhmalbaf, the director of Gabbeh in which he also used such stunning colours, in this case used the women’s colourful clothing for its cinematographic effect but also for its social significance. In this way Nadereh’s nervousness, when at a certain point she sees a soldier with an automatic weapon, seems linked to the fact that she is not complying with Iranian dress codes.
