A film by Amir Naderi
Introducing Madjid Niroumand
RIALTO PICTURES PRESSBOOK
THE RUNNER
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Director
Amir Naderi
Introducing Madjid Niroumand as Amiro
Screenplay
Amir Naderi
Behrouz Gharibpour
Director of Photography
Firouz Malekzadeh
Editor
Bahram Beyzaie
Producer
Alireza Zarrin
Sound Designer
Amir Naderi
Sound Mixer
Mohammad Haghighi
Sound Recordist
Nezamoddin Kiaie
Subtitles (2022)
Maryam Najafi
Bruce Goldstein
An Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (KANOON) production
First release: 1984 (Iran)
Iran Color Mono 1.33:1 Running time: 94 min
A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE
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WHAT THE CRITICS HAVE SAID ABOUT THE RUNNER
“A work of astonishing power and simplicity, reminiscent of the finest Italian neo-realist
films…The Runner’s waterside setting allows Naderi full rein for his strong sense of the
visual…One suspects that Madjid Niroumand is not a professional actor, yet his
seemingly spontaneous portrayal ranks among the finest ever given by a child.”
— Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
“In Naderi’s clever mise en scene, the omnipresence of ocean liners, planes, and trains—
modes of escape unavailable to him—heighten Amiro’s sense of entrapment and
hopelessness. Like Buñuel, Naderi shows a keen understanding of children’s camaraderie
and determination…The plot and setting of Iranian director Amir Naderi’s The Runner are
reminiscent of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados and early Pasolini.”
— Ted Shen, Chicago Reader
“Naderi is at his most evocative when he doesn’t spell things out completely, when he
lets the powerful images of this handsome-faced boy speak for themselves…It stays with
you…Amir Naderi’s The Runner hovers somewhere between poetry and documentary.”
— Hal Hinson, The Washington Post
“A SMALL JEWEL YOU MUST TRY TO SEE.”
— Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
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AMIR NADERI (Director, Screenwriter)
Born in the Iranian port city of Abadan (setting of The Runner
1
), Amir Naderi’s career
began in the 1970s in Iran, where he quickly became one of the major figures of the Iranian
New Wave, with award-winning documentaries and features including Waiting (1974), The
Search (1980), The Runner (1984) and Water, Wind, Dust (made in 1985, but unreleased
until1989), bringing Iran to the forefront of the international cinema scene.
Naderi moved to the United Started in 1986, where he continued to work as an
independent filmmaker in New York. His New York trilogy includes Manhattan by
Numbers (1993), which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, as well
as A,B,C… Manhattan (1997), which premiered at Cannes, and Marathon (2003), which
quickly became a cult classic.
Naderi’s Sound Barrier (2005) had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the
Roberto Rossellini Prize at the Rome Film Festival. Vegas: Based on True Story (2008)
was in competition at Venice, where it won the CinemAvvenire Best Film in Competition
Prize and the SIGNIS Award.
In 2011, Naderi wrote and directed Cut, with Hidetoshi Nishijima (later star of Hamaguchi’s
Drive My Car), shot in Japan and entirely in Japanese. His 2016 film Monte was shot in
Italy and in the Italian language. Both films had their premieres at Venice. In 2016, he
received the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award at the 73rd Venice
International Film Festival.
Throughout his career, Naderi has been the recipient of many awards and accolades from
major film festivals around the world. His work has also been the subject of a number of
retrospectives at international museums, film festivals, and cinematheques, including Film
at Lincoln Center (2000), the Pompidou Center in Paris (2018), and the Museum of
Modern Art (2018).
His latest film, The Magic Lantern, was shot in L.A in 2018. Later, Moon, a film project in
China, was canceled due to the pandemic.
Mr. Naderi currently divides his time between Los Angeles and Tokyo, where he is
developing two new films.
1
Though set in Abadan, The Runner was shot elsewhere, due to the Iran/Iraq war. See page 8.
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AMIR NADERI: IRRESISTIBLE FORCES, IMMOVABLE OBJECTS
Amir Naderi’s journey as a filmmaker began in Iran, where he was born in the southern
port city of Abadan in 1946. Orphaned as a child, he spent his formative years on the
street (an existence dramatized in his 1984 feature The Runner). A job working in a
movie theater led him to discover his true homeland—the cinema—and Naderi has
remained a citizen of that refined world ever since, pursuing his passion for filmmaking
around the globe with no regard for physical borders or language barriers.
Naderi made his first films in the 1970s at Iran’s famed Institute for the Intellectual
Development of Children and Young Adults, working alongside Abbas Kiarostami.
After The Runner and Water, Wind, Dust found critical favor on the international film
festival circuit, Naderi relocated to New York. Themes of isolation and alienation, already
present in his work, were amplified by his encounter with the city, and with Manhattan by
Numbers (1993), Naderi began an extraordinary series of films — including A, B, C...
Manhattan (1997), Marathon (2002), and Sound Barrier (2005) — in which characters
map their desire for emotional connection onto the coldly rational structures of New
York’s street grid and transportation systems.
With Vegas: Based on a True Story (2008), Naderi again expanded his territory, moving
first to the American West, then to Japan (for the 2011 Cut!), and back in time to
medieval Italy for his most recent film, Monte (2016), the story of a poor farmer who
picks a quarrel with no less a force than geography itself.
- Dave Kehr, curator of Amir Naderi retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, 2018
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MADJID NIROUMAND (Amiro)
Born in Tehran, Madjid Niroumand, who plays the central role of the resourceful young
street kid Amiro in The Runner, was accidentally discovered by director Amir Naderi when
he spotted the boy on the front cover of a sports magazine, in a group photo of a winning
track and field team. But it was 11-year-old Madjid who jumped off the cover.
Mr. Niroumand recounts, “Mr. Naderi was in the south of Iran trying to find a kid to be his
main actor. He was looking in the south of Iran because that’s where the film is set. But
once he saw the magazine, he said "That’s my Amiro!" He then traveled to Tehran to find
me. He went to the magazine office and the track and field federation to get my address
and came to our house. He was waiting for me to come home from school and, when he
saw me on the street walking home, he knew then and there that I would be Amiro.”
Niroumand’s performance in The Runner was named #12 in a list of “The 25 Greatest
Child Performances in Cinema History” on the film site Taste of Cinema. The Los Angeles
Times called it “the greatest performance ever given by a child.”
A year after The Runner, Niroumand played the lead in Naderi’s Water, Wind, Dust. Prior
to leaving Iran in 1987 at age 16, Madjid did voiceovers for a number of Iranian movies
and TV series. In 2016, Niroumand’s harrowing account of his escape from his native
country was told in the documentary A Boy’s Own Story, a film by Mojtaba Bakhtiari Azad.
Now a resident of Southern California, Niroumand serves as the Vice President of Student
Affairs at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California.
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AMIR NADERI
Interviewed by Sakiko Kageyama
November 19, 2012
Since filming Cut! (2011) with Hidetoshi Nishijima (later star of Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car),
Amir Naderi has made himself at home in Japan
2
. We interviewed him before the
Japanese theatrical release of his autobiographical film The Runner.
Amir Naderi and Madjid Niroumand on set, 1984, and at Pompidou Center, Paris, 2018
You mentioned that you first saw Madjid Niroumand, whom you later cast as Amiro
in The Runner, walking down a back street and immediately thought, “oh, that’s
me!” and ran after him. What about him made you see yourself in him?
3
It was just my gut reaction. I can’t explain it, but I knew he could play me. He was walking
around whistling, looking relaxed and happy. I felt like he was waiting for me. He was a
smart kid and ate his meals sitting properly on a sofreh (cloth for eating), meaning he was
raised in a proper family, and he was well behaved... I grew up in a kucheh (alley), but I
think I had something deep inside of me. I grew up on the streets, but I wasn’t a delinquent.
I played around a lot, but I was strictly disciplined by my aunt growing up.
Did The Runner have a script, or did you and Madjid improvise the lines on the spot?
I don’t write complete screenplays when working with amateur actors. I tell them about a
specific subject and have them talk about it in their own words while giving them small
hints called shahed (plot points). The children were amateurs and had southern accents,
so they wouldn’t have been able to say the lines from a prepared script.
The key to filming kids is to let them be free. The camera must work around them.
The film depicts fishing out bottles from the sea, chasing each other around, putting
coins on railroad tracks, living on an abandoned ship… all personal experiences?
2
Since this interview, he has moved back to the United States.
3
Madjid’s own recollection of their first meeting differs from Mr. Naderi’s. See page 6.
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Let me tell you a little about the coin episode. There’s a saying, "Iron is iron whether it’s
melted down or not", which means that a person must have a strong core. But after I
realized I could no longer use the two rial coins (worth less than a penny in U.S. currency)
after they got crushed on the tracks, I knew I had to develop my own strong core so that I
wouldn’t be crushed, even if a train ran over me. I learned that I needed to be useful no
matter the hardship. Amiro vows never to go in the ocean again after encountering a shark,
because he knows that he’d no longer be able to use his legs if they were eaten by sharks.
The coin incident, picking up bottles, and living on an abandoned ship are all personal
experiences. The film is still fresh, because they’re all real events. I didn't add anything
fake. The children's races and bike rides were all things I did as a kid. Children in Junub
[southern Iran] lived like that, although it may be different in other areas like Shomal [in
the North, near the Caspian Sea].
You were no longer able to film in your hometown of Abadan because the Iran-Iraq
War was intensifying. Instead, you managed to make eleven different filming
locations look like one town. Talk about the power of editing.
It's not so much the power of editing, but how you choose the locations that make it look
like one town that’s crucial. You should tell me my location selection abilities are good!
Abadan is a hot, dry, and naturally harsh region. I think it’s different from other parts of
Iran. We had to move from place to place, because we couldn't continue filming in Abadan
due to the ravages of war. We had to move around, but I knew we couldn’t shoot where
there were any green trees. I had an image in my mind of what places could work and
really struggled to choose them. The scenes in the film are all collages of myself. We shot
the film over a period of five to six months under the difficult circumstances of the ongoing
war. The children were getting bigger, so I chose the locations accordingly and shot
various scenes. In the beginning, the children were still young and filled with romanticism.
The more the kids grew into society, the more the locations became harsh, to reflect the
increasing violence they faced. Transportation slowly increased in size as well, from
bicycles and small planes to jumbo jets.
In the scene where Amiro rides his bike in front of a jet plane, it looks like he’s going
faster than the plane.
The most important thing for me was that his knowledge was as fast as a jumbo jet. I made
him practice and perfect the alefba (32-letter Persian alphabet). He practiced it whenever
he could, so that he’d be able to recite the whole thing before the plane takes off. We shot
it with no cuts, in one take. That’s why it’s so powerful. If there was a cut, you wouldn’t be
able to tell if he was actually saying the whole alefba. It would be a lie. The plane looks
like it’s crawling up out of the mud when it’s taking off, just like Amiro.
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It seems that everything has a meaning.
Watching it now, it feels like there are different meanings to each scene, but I didn’t think
it at the time. It wouldn’t have been properly conveyed to the audience if I had thought
about symbolism while making it. Everyone has different experiences, and fake stories
don’t translate. Let me tell you why I made this film. At the time, we were at war with Iraq.
The town of Abadan, where I was born and raised, was destroyed, and everyone moved
to other towns. More and more children were without parents, and many became street
kids, because they could no longer go to school. Many of them were orphaned. I wanted
to show them my own childhood experiences, and what it meant to “fall down but stand
up” through hardship. War is a battle between countries, but children were also fighting
every day back then. This movie was about hope. It was a huge hit at the time. People
who saw it were energized. Some parents even named their newborn children Amiro.
Translated from the Japanese by Mimiko Goldstein.
During this interview, Mr. Naderi drew pictures of planes, trucks, ships, and helicopters,
while energetically talking.
.
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A CONVERSATION WITH AMIR NADERI
AT THE TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL, 2015
There’s a strong symbolic dimension in your films. For example, planes. What
drives you to symbolism? Is it in response to censorship issues?
No, I don’t think about those things. I’m not a political person and I don’t want my films to
be. No, the planes are to show how he feels sorry for his fate and the fate of his country.
I’m just trying to draw parallels between this young, driven boy who is stuck in a place, in
a situation and the moving elements of modern life: bicycles, trains, trucks, whatever. That
is how I try to put things in perspective. If you persevere, if you want something, if you fight
to get what you want, you can get it. That is what the whole film is about.
You once said that you were doing “narrative cinema,” but later you switched to an
anti-narrative framework, as in The Runner. How can you explain this change?
My first three films were all big productions with big stars. However, I soon realized that I
had to go back to my own personal experiences, my own experience of the city, my own
experience as an individual within a group, etc.… things that really matter to me, things
that get lost in big productions, because they’re only concerned with “how” something is
done not why and where it is coming from. A film like The Runner comes from the heart,
from my soul. It is a totally different kind of cinema. Since I made that switch, I have not
changed my way as a filmmaker. During the shooting of my first three films, I learned how
to use technical and visual tools, how to tell a story and how to use a camera. And it was
only after I understood all that, that I was able to achieve what I wanted: to see characters
like myself on the big screen. I think this approach and these children’s stories were what
caused the emergence of a new cinematic wave in Iran.
There’s a certain style of diegetic American music in your work. How deliberate is
that?
I grew up with these sounds. I love Jazz and you know, for the longest time I was obsessed
with playing the trombone. At the time, places other than Tehran, the capital, were much
more traditional and you couldn’t really see much of the “west” and “western influences in
them. But, the south of Iran, which is where I grew up was totally different. It was almost
like living on another planet. The Marlboros, the music, the jeans, the boots, the oil, the
ships… that sort of thing was all around you. I just chose this music because it matched
the environment I wanted to create and it is what I remember.
Bahram Beyzaie was the editor. He’s also a very well-known director.
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After discovering the French New Wave during my travels, I was very motivated to have
my own circle of creative collaborators. That is why I wrote the screenplay for Abbas
Kiarostami’s The Experience, worked with Mohammadreza Aslani, and that’s also why
Beyzaie helped me as an editor. We were all trying to work together and learn from each
other at that time. I was lucky, because he’s a very good editor!
The main character of Harmonica is also named Amiro, like in The Runner. Are both
Amir Naderi?
Yes, they’re both me. I’ve never made a single film without a part of me in it. Even in my
U.S. films, or in my last film in Japan, or my new film in Italy. Everything stems from my
experiences as a person, and then of course there is a bit of imagination involved!
Where did you shoot The Runner?
That is a very interesting question. I made this film in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War.
Wherever we set up the camera, the war was going on less than a mile away. After the
revolution, I realized that there were so many children who had lost their families or their
fathers and were trying to get to Tehran or other cities. I thought, “Should I do something?”
I owed that to my city. I owed it to those kids who were growing up that way.
I went to Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults)
and told them that I wanted to make a film with their backing. I wanted to show that these
street children were heroes and give them back the crown they deserved. One of the
executives, Mr. Zarrin, who ended up producing the film, told me that he grew up watching
my movies and said, “Let’s do this.” So I went to Abadan, but it was destroyed and burnt.
The city I knew no longer existed. I found myself facing war and corruption at the same
time. I ended up shooting the film in no less than eleven cities. Everybody said to me after
the movie, “What city is this? This is not in Iran.” [laughs] This is the magic of cinema: it’s
a cinematic collage that represents my city. I was obsessed with Godard’s editing and
Orson Welles’ Othello: he did it that way. There’s a take in Spain, then one in Italy, a bit of
this, a bit of that…at the end, it’s a creation from the heart.
Translated from the French by Adrienne Halpern.
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RIALTO PICTURES
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New material © 2022 Rialto Pictures LLC
Pressbook edited by Bruce Goldstein, Adrienne Halpern and Dave Franklin
