The Runner
This week we are showing Amir Naderi’s The Runner (1984) on Thursday, February 26th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP.
Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!
Amiro is a young boy living alone in a derelict oil tankard in the coastal city of Abadan, scraping a living collecting bottles, shining shoes, and selling ice water. Engulfed in the heavy machinic audio surround of a whooshing port urbanism, Amiro spends his free time learning to read and struggling through various endurance tests with other boys. This is punctuated by Amiro’s solitary habit of shouting exuberant, hailing yowls at passing ships and planes, those massive machines of escape,
The Runner, loosely based on Amir Naderi’s own childhood, is beautiful narrative cinema about motion and the life worlds enabled by contraptions of various scales. The port’s elements are fire and water, oil and dust; its background traced out into the skylines cut by cranes and drills and railroad tracks. Naderi brings us in to watch the great expenditure of energy required just to stay in the same spot, to train, to repeat a habit long enough for it to change state and become something else.
Even though it’s a radically different tone, following Brewster McCloud with another film on the appeal of flight feels perfect. I’m excited to share this one with all of you!The Runner has such a dizzying density of Stefan-preoccupations: the brilliance of Iranian child actors, middle distance running, literacy education, machine-human relations, a concern with freedom and exile, and the limits of verbal expression.
[yelling], Stefan, Charlie, and Ham Dan