Blindness
Fernando Meirelles | Canada/Brazil | 2008
120 min

Imagine if people start going blind at random. No reason, no warning. It won’t happen to everyone at the same time, but in slow intervals, and everyday this number of people will increase. That is the world in Blindness. Fearing that the disease might be contagious, the government locks the infected in a hospital ward, to control the outbreak. Things are going fine in the beginning. There is food, the ward is clean, there is space, and people are waiting patiently to be cured. But then, more and more blind people are sent in, the ward becomes overcrowded, food supply has to be rationed, and then things go very wrong.

Most people are ready to behave in the way society expects them to. Society has given each culture different sets of rules and regulations to help us lead our lives. While everyone’s ethical code might be unique, it is written by the ethical codes of the community we are a part of. But what happens when the society we are a part of breaks down? Which ethical codes do we follow when the society that gave them to us is changing rapidly? Changes in morality are ever-changing and are usually controlled. But there are great shifts when there is an event that changes the way we live. This can be due to an outbreak of war, the fall of an economy, the destruction of government, a huge natural disaster, and in the case of this film, mass and sudden blindness.

A lot of us read about atrocities in the news or in history books, and we imagine WE could NEVER do that. I believe to a great extent it is our circumstances and situations that dictate our actions, and if we refuse to understand this, we risk not being able to overcome it. Blindness is about such a predicament.