An Iranian tearjerker about an eight-year-old blind boy whose father, a widowed coal worker, belatedly collects him from a school for the blind in Tehran, takes him to the family farm, and then tries to send him to become an apprentice. I haven’t seen any earlier films by Majid Majidi, director of the Oscar-nominated Children of Heaven, but if this 1999 drama is any indication, he’s an utterly conventional sentimental humanist, providing better-than-average storytelling skills, an eye for landscapes that would make him a pretty good calendar artist, but none of the challenges offered by Kiarostami or Makhmalbaf. If you aren’t looking for anything of artistic or social interest but are nonetheless attracted by Iranian cinema’s relative lack of obvious cynicism, this may be just what the doctor ordereda Middle Eastern counterpart to Disney or Spielberg. In Farsi with subtitles. 90 min. (JR)