After spending precious minutes considering letting his son float away, Hashem jumps in and rides the river to the Caspian Sea. Awakening on the shores of the Caspian, Hashem sees his son lying there and grabs a hold of him only to find that he has died. The film then ends as a woodpecker sounds and Mohammad's fingers glow and begin to move.
While The Color of Paradise would outwardly appear to be just a story of the trials and tribulations of a broken Iranian family, in actuality the film is strongly representative of both Iranian culture as a whole and the political spirit of the Iranian people. A particularly interesting aspect of the film was its deference to Zoroastrian aspects rather than the Islamic ones traditionally associated with Iran. A great deal of the movie focused on nature and mans' interactions with it, especially water. This is a key detail because, for Zoroastrians, Apas or "the waters" are an essential aspect of their faith. In the film, water is seen as a cleansing agent; the father was a troubled man when he went into the river, only to emerge cleansed. It should be noted that Zoroastrianism has long pre-dated Islam in Iran and in a sense the film was saying that it was Zoroastrianism, rather than Islam brought by Arabs, which was truly representative of the Iranian people. Keeping with the theme of nature, The Color of Paradise features multiple occasions where the good show their "true colors," while the evil also show theirs. In the film, the boy saves a bird and the grandmother saves a fish while the father sees a helpless turtle and ignores it. These instances show the great relationship between nature and the people of Iran, or at least with some of the people. Representative of both the past and future of Iran, the grandmother and Mohammad respect and enjoy nature. On the other hand, the father, representative of the current Iranian state, cared nothing for the birds, turtles or water until his son, representative of the nation's future, was drowning and by that time it was already too late.
