StemCell Therapy

Blindness is a 2008 Canadian film in English. It is an adaptation of the 1995 novel of the same name by Portuguese author Jos Saramago about a society suffering an epidemic of blindness. The film was written by Don McKellar and directed by Fernando Meirelles with Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo as the main characters. Saramago originally refused to sell the rights for a film adaptation, but the producers were able to acquire it with the condition that the film would be set in an unnamed and unrecognizable city. Blindness premiered as the opening film at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14, 2008, and the film was released in the United States on October 3, 2008.

In an unnamed city, a young Japanese professional (Yusuke Iseya) is suddenly struck blind for no apparent reason. The Japanese man is approached by a few concerned people, one of whom (Don McKellar) offers to drive him home, and later steals his car. The blinded man describes his sudden affliction: an expanse of dazzling white, as though he is "swimming in milk".

Upon arriving home later that evening and noticing her husband's blindness, the Japanese man's wife (Yoshino Kimura) takes him to a local ophthalmologist (Mark Ruffalo) who, after testing the man's eyes, can identify nothing wrong with his sight and recommends further evaluation at a hospital. Among the doctor's patients are an old man with a black eye-patch (Danny Glover), a woman with dark glasses (Alice Braga), and a young boy (Mitchell Nye).

During a dinner with his wife (Julianne Moore), the doctor discusses the strange case of sudden blindness that hit the Japanese man. Elsewhere in the city, the woman with dark glassesrevealed to be a call-girlbecomes the third victim of the strange blindness after an appointment with a john in a luxury hotel.

The next day, the doctor wakes up to realize that he too has gone blind. In various locations around the city, more citizens are struck blind, causing widespread panic, and the government organizes a quarantine for the blind in a local derelict asylum. When a hazmat crew arrives to pick up the doctor, his wife climbs into the van with him, lying that she has also gone blind in order to accompany him into isolation.

In the asylum, the doctor and his wife are first to arrive and both agree they will keep her sight a secret. Several others arrive: the woman with dark glasses, the Japanese man, the car thief, and the young boy. The doctor's wifewho continues to remain sightedcomes across the old man with the eye-patch, who describes the condition of the world outside. The sudden blindness, known only as the "white sickness", is now international, with hundreds of cases being reported every day. Desperate by this point, the increasingly totalitarian government resorts to increasingly ruthless measures to try to staunch the epidemic, refusing the sick any aid or medicines.

In due course, as more and more blind people are crammed into the fetid prison, overcrowding and total lack of any outside support cause the hygiene and living conditions to degrade horrifically in a short time. Soon, the walls and floors are caked in filth and human feces. Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by irregular deliveries, undermines the morale inside. The lack of organization prevents the blind internees from fairly distributing food among each other. The soldiers who guard the asylum become increasingly hostile.

Living conditions degenerate even further when an armed clique of men, led by an ex-barman who declares himself the king of ward 3 (Gael Garca Bernal), gains control over the sparse deliveries of food. The MRE rations are distributed only in exchange for valuables, and then for the women of the other wards. Faced with starvation, the doctor's wife snaps and murders the king of ward 3. His death initiates a chaotic war between the wards, which culminates with the asylum being burned down and most of the inmates die in the fire. Only then do the few survivors discover that the military have abandoned their posts and they are free to venture into the city.

Society has fallen as the entire population is blind amid a city devastated and overrun with filth and dead bodies. The doctor's wife leads her husband and several others in search of food and shelter. The doctor and his wife arrive in a supermarket filled with stumbling blind people, and they find food in a basement storeroom. As she prepares to leave and meet her husband outside, she is attacked by the starving people who smell the food she is carrying. Her husband, now used to his blindness, saves her and they manage to return to their friends.

The doctor and his wife with their new "family" eventually make their way back to the house of the doctor, where they establish a permanent home. Just as suddenly as his sight had been lost, the Japanese man recovers his sight one morning. As the friends all celebrate, the doctor's wife stands out on the porch, staring up into a white overcast sky and for a moment appears to be going blind herself until the video camera shifts downwards, revealing that she sees the cityscape before her.

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Blindness (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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