Everyone was smiling and their hand gestures and body language were all giving away glimpses of their eagerness to meet their beloved Prophet.
MUHAMMAD MESSENGER OF GOD 2015 MOVIE MOVIE
As soon as the movie started, I found my mind and soul silently leaving me and flying towards the Arabian Peninsula, in order to experience the light of the Prophet. But I soon realized that Majid Majidi had other plans for me. I thought reaching Montreal had brought my summer traveling to an end. Yesterday, after years of digging around in caves of religiously inspired artistic creativity, I found a rare diamond. Only once in a while do I find a rare gem, whose radiating shine manages to enlighten both my mind and heart in a compatible manner. With time, I have become very sensitive and critical when analyzing experiences with high emotional content that trigger wonderment and fascination, as some of those experiences are solely based on feelings, while carrying very little reasoning and logic. These are all words I have read often in books but rarely used in my day-to-day life, and even more rarely in my writings. It’s yet to be seen whether Majidi’s film will be led into the promised land of a wide release.Dazed. And another that did well was DeMille’s own 1956 film, “The Ten Commandments,” with Charlton Heston playing the sea-parting prophet Moses. The 1977 Quranic epic “The Message,” starring Anthony Quinn as the uncle of the unseen and unheard prophet, drew crowds and long lines to movie theaters in Tehran. In the past, such religious films have done well in Iran.
He and others declined to elaborate on who provided financial backing for it, though there are wealthy investors and religious institutions in Iran that likely would support such efforts. Mohammad Mahdi Heidarian, head of the private Nourtaban Film Industry company, said his company spent about $30 million in total to make the movie. And if this film is successful, its producers say they hope to film two sequels, one focusing on Muhammad’s life from his teenage years to his 40s and another after 40 when he became the prophet of Islam. Filming took a year, while postproduction in Germany took two more years.
Producers plan to ultimately release the film in Arabic, Persian and English, with showings across Iran and abroad in the summer. Iranian film critics generally have praised the film as well, like Mostafa Seyedabadi, who declared its color and lighting as “astonishing,” However, critic Masoud Farasati dismissed some of the film’s shots, like a low-angle view of the prophet as a teen against the sky, as a “Hollywood” knockoff. So far, the film appears to have the support of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s current supreme leader, who attended an inauguration of the film’s set in 2012. “We are an Islamic country, we know the related culture and we have capabilities for production of such movies.” “We are ready to cooperate to produce any movies to introduce Muhammad to the world,” Majidi said.
Majidi said he would be ready to cooperate with any Islamic country planning a film on Muhammad. Meanwhile, the Sunni kingdom of Qatar has announced plans to have its own $1 billion epic shot on the prophet’s life. In February, Egypt’s Al-Azhar, one of Sunni Islam’s most prestigious seats of learning, called on Iran to ban a film it described as debasing the sanctity of messengers from God. Yet, the film already has seen widespread criticism even before being widely released, largely from predominantly Sunni Arab countries. “For Muslims, the Prophet Muhammad is a mercy to the world and the hereafter,” he said. He blamed Islamic extremists and the West for sullying the image of a pillar of faith for 1.5 billion people across the world. Anderson, three-time Oscar-winning Italian director of photography Vittorio Storaro and music producer Allah-Rakha Rahman, who won two Academy Awards for his work on “Slumdog Millionaire.”īy making a high-quality film, Majidi said it will give the world the right impression about the Prophet Muhammad.
Iranian actor Ali Reza Shoja Nouri, who plays Abdul-Muttalib, the grandfather of the prophet Muhammad, in the movie “Muhammad, Messenger of God.” (photo credit: AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)įor his vision, Majidi hired Academy Award winning visual effects supervisor and filmmaker Scott E.