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.
Organized by Dave Kehr, Curator, Department of Film.
