Like memories drifting up from a dream, the narrative’s impressionistic torrent shows us fragments of the boy’s haphazard existence: making money by selling water, shining shoes or fishing empty bottles from the sea playing with some kids and enduring tense rivalries with others making his solitary household on the upper deck of a gigantic abandoned tanker observing the comings and goings, the fashions and music of exotic foreigners who pass through the busy port city (the film offers a flavorful glimpse of pre-Revolutionary Iran) trying to learn the alphabet so he can read the aviation magazines that fascinate him.Ĭapturing one of the key paradoxes of childhood, “The Runner” paints Amiro’s existence as one of both freedom and confinement. (Because the Iran-Iraq war was raging around the city when the film was made, Naderi was obliged to film in other locations.) This is 11-year-old Amiro (an amazing Madjid Niroumand), an orphaned ragamuffin who lives by his wits in coastal Abadan. It begins with a shout-of wonderment mixed with desperation-emitting from a boy watching tankers far out on the shimmering Persian Gulf. I can’t think of any 2022 film that radiates so much joy in the act of filmmaking, or that can serve as such an electrifying inspiration to younger artists. The film is a natural for the audiences of New York’s Film Forum, where it will open on Friday, but I would like to put out a special alert urging every film student in the New York area (production or cinema studies) to see “The Runner.” To say that the 1984 movie doesn’t seem at all dated is almost an understatement. theatrical release courtesy of Bruce Goldstein’s Rialto Pictures, which specializes in the reissue of renowned cinema classics. Though Iranian cinema’s post-Revolutionary revival continued apace from the mid-‘80s on and produced some extraordinary films, it wasn’t until Jafar Panahi’s “The White Balloon” won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1995 that distributors began to take notice and Iranian films became an international art-house phenomenonīut if “The Runner” was among the films that arrived too early to benefit from that attention, it has retained a legendary reputation among cinephiles and admirers of Iranian cinema.

That’s likely true, but unfortunately few Americans have had the chance to become so smitten-till now. “Everyone who sees this film falls in love with it,” a friend recently remarked.

Mixed in key torrent