One of the most prestigious Canadian-international co-productions ever, Blindness opened this year's Cannes Film Festival. Based on the Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramango's dazzling novel of the same name, the film brings together an extraordinary cast (Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Sandra Oh, Maury Chaykin), an accomplished Latin American filmmaker—City Of God's co-director Fernando Meirelles—and a script and supporting appearance by Canada's own Don McKellar.

The result is an apocalyptic fantasy like no other in the history of the cinema. While the storyline revolves around a typical science fiction trope—when an unexplained epidemic of blindness breaks out, society must be completely re-imagined and restructured along desperate and sometimes brutal lines—Blindness is undeniably original, sweeping and ultimately disturbing in its scale and conception. A major entry in the end-of-the-world cinematic sweepstakes, Blindness helps define and explain the distemper of our times while leaving just enough room for the human spirit to redeem itself.