In Amir Naderi’s The Runner, there’s a recurring motif where the young protagonist sprints toward the cargo ships he sees in the water and the planes that fly overhead the Iranian port city of Abadan, where he lives. The 11-year-old Amiro, who’s made a home of an abandoned tanker, is enthralled by the roving leviathans, yelling hey, hey, hey relentlessly at them. His gleeful entreaty is open for interpretation: is he merely seeking attention from the enviable explorers within, or do they represent a yearning for a sort of liberation?
Despite suggestions that he might wish to leave his impoverished life, Amiro—played to innocent, joyful perfection by Madjid Niroumand, whose performance is reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s revelatory turn in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959)—doesn’t seem to lament his circumstances. He makes his way in the world doing odd jobs, such as collecting glass bottles, selling ice water, and shining shoes. His lack of parental oversight isn’t acknowledged; rather, he lives alone in his makeshift dwelling, enjoying the company of his friends and the competitive games they play, which Amiro excels at owing to his quick pace.
The 1984 film, screening as part of the Annual Festival of Films from Iran at the Gene Siskel Film Center, is based on Naderi’s formative years; a new restoration with updated subtitles makes this postrevolutionary masterpiece ripe for rediscovery. The Iranian New Wave luminary, along with such other filmmakers as Abbas Kiarostami and Bahram Beyzai (who edited The Runner), turned to making films about children after the 1979 revolution, when the government instituted censorious laws that, among other restrictions, prohibited artists from expressing themselves freely.
Stories about children served as an entryway into exploring larger societal issues in Iran in the midst of the new regime’s conservative ideology, a subject ever so timely of late. Frustrated masses have taken to the streets—exposing themselves to injury, arrest, and worse—to protest the Islamic Republic following the death of a young Kurdish woman for not properly wearing her hijab. In recognition of recent events, the Film Center will host a free virtual conversation about art and activism in Iran in association with the festival, with details to be announced soon.
Abed Abest’s Killing the Eunuch Khan (2021) abstractly explores the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s through a modern Iranian lens. Set along the border between the two countries, the film opens on a house where two young girls live with their father; a bomb falls in their yard, killing one of the girls and leaving a seemingly bottomless pit in its wake. What occurs thereafter is sometimes frustratingly oblique, buoyed to an almost gimmicky extent by admittedly stunning visuals, courtesy of cinematographer Hamid Khozouie Abyane. “The serial killer intends to slaughter so many that the blood of the victims spills over the ditches of the city,” reads a commonly propagated summary of the film. “To reach his target, he designs a plan in which victims kill more victims.” This is one of those self-consciously artsy films that mistakes silence—long, dialogue-less sequences that serve only to introduce other long, dialogue-less sequences—for substance.
The film has garnered comparisons to those of Stanley Kubrick and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Similarly, both Mani Haghighi’s Subtraction (2022) and Arian Vazirdaftari’s debut feature Without Her (2022) may be termed Hitchcockian; the latter specifically recalls Hitchcock by way of Brian De Palma. Another degree of separation from the masters of cinema is that Haghighi (2006’s Men at Work, 2018’s Pig) is the grandson of Ebrahim Golestan, the revered Iranian auteur also featured prominently in the festival.
Subtraction centers on two couples (both played by Navid Mohammadzadeh and Taraneh Alidoosti, the latter being the star of Asghar Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday (2006), About Elly (2009), and The Salesman (2016), who was recently arrested at protest and let out on bail) who are each others’ doppelgängers. One of the couples is working class, the other affluent. The husband from the former and the wife from the latter conspire, with growing intimacy, to help the other man escape the consequences of a violent outburst at his white-collar job.
Actor-writer-director Haghighi (who’s collaborated with Kiarostami and Farhadi) interprets concerns respective to Iranian cinema somewhat differently than his compatriots, often working in genre to do so. He was inspired to make Subtraction after he saw a picture of a man who looked just like him in a photography exhibition about the Iran-Iraq war. Less specifically, the film speaks to an almost otherworldly sensation of having to accept and live with something out of the ordinary—something that Iranians are more familiar with than most.
Mohammadzadeh and Alidoosti also star together in Leila’s Brothers (2022), which was banned in Iran after it screened at the Cannes Film Festival without government permission. Alidoosti plays the titular Leila, who’s determined to see her four brothers (one of them played by Mohammadzadeh) lifted out of poverty. A small fortune squirreled away by their status-obsessed father becomes the center of their problems; Leila and her brothers aspire to open a shop with the money, while their father wants to give it to a wealthy family member in exchange for becoming patriarch of their clan.
Without Her, like Subtraction, is another genre parable: Roya (Tannaz Tabatabaei), a well-to-do woman who’s soon to emigrate to Denmark with her husband, takes in the younger Ziba, who has no one or nowhere to turn to. Ziba soon begins assuming aspects of Roya’s life, with others appearing to believe that she’s actually the person Roya really is. Out of all of the films in the festival, this one possesses the near-maddening ambiguity that suffuses much Iranian cinema, as one feels Roya’s frustration when others in her life stop believing who she is.
Annual Festival of Films from IranGene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 2/10-2/19General admission $13 per film, with discounts for Film Center members, students, youth, and SAIC students, staff, and facultysiskelfilmcenter.org/annual-festival-films-iran
Perhaps second in that regard would be Houman Seyyedi’s World War III (2022), Iran’s submission to this year’s Academy Awards in the Best International Feature category. Shakib (Mohsen Tanabandeh) is an aimless day laborer whose wife and child died in an earthquake years prior. He takes a job on a nearby shoot for a film set during the Holocaust and featuring Hitler as a main character. Against all odds, Shakib lands a role in the film—the starring role as the dictator, in fact. He boasts about his newfound success to a young, deaf-mute sex worker with whom he’s been in a long-standing (albeit transactional) relationship. Tensions escalate when she comes to stay with him on set, her vengeful pimp having followed her. I won’t disclose what happens next, but the questions it raises—as to what’s going on, who’s telling the truth, and the degree to which parallels between the movie in the film and Shakib’s dilemma are intentional—certainly account for a heightened level of ambiguity.
Ebrahim Golestan was a leading figure in the initial, prerevolutionary Iranian New Wave, as well as a respected literary figure. His debut feature Brick and Mirror (1965) will screen at the festival, along with a program of his short films. Merging neorealist qualities with a visual sensibility that evokes German expressionism, the film follows a young taxi driver after a female passenger abandons her baby in his cab. What to do with the child becomes a source of concern and contention among his social circle, his girlfriend in particular aspiring to marry and keep the child as their own.
Brick and Mirror offers a prescient glimpse of prerevolutionary Iran with all its seemingly modern zeal, beneath which festers troubles portending future conflict. It was the first Iranian film to use direct sound and is the first and only feature made under the auspices of the Golestan Film Workshop, which Golestan founded to produce his own films as well as Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s landmark documentary short, The House Is Black (1963), about a leper colony. Golestan’s short films Courtship (1961), A Fire (1961), The Hills of Marlik (1963), and The Crown Jewels of Iran (1965) compose the short films program, aptly titled “Radical Artistry.”
Mitra Farahani’s See You Friday, Robinson (2022) documents the unlikely correspondence between Golestan and Jean-Luc Godard, who died in September. (Meanwhile, Golestan turned 100 last year.) Though the two never met in person, they exchanged communications every Friday for several months in 2014. It was Farahani who brought the two filmmakers together, at least in an epistolary sense, and it’s the creation and detangling of their emails and letters that make up much of the film.
Anyone familiar with Godard will recognize—and, like me, will be frustrated by—the obscure content of his messages. Golestan himself comments on it, though he persists in their exchange. The documentary footage of the filmmakers is both edifying and endearing; apparently Godard putters around his Swiss cottage wearing T-shirts and cargo shorts like any other homebody. It feels less like a film about two major figureheads of world cinema and more like a vade mecum for getting on in years and attempting finally to answer life’s lingering questions—or at least becoming content with realizing that might not happen. Even later in life these elder sages are much like young Amiro, eager to learn about what’s off in the distance.