Amir Naderi, The Runner (1984), DCP

The kid goes and goes and never stops going. Amir Naderi’s tenth film, and not only his breakthrough feature in the West but also, as Godfrey Cheshire puts it in his essential study of Iranian cinema, “Post-Revolutionary Iran’s first masterpiece and one of the most exhilarating films in cinema history,” is about going. The feral side of kids, their unquenchable desire for more, beyond the limits of the visible, the prescribed-as-legal, the spoken. There are very few words spoken in THE RUNNER, but words aren’t necessary to convey the restlessness, the dreams of its titular 11-year-old orphan protagonist Amiro (a stunning performance by Madjid Niroumand) as he shines shoes (De Sica), evades his fate as one of the young and the damned (Buñuel), and tries to eke out a future for himself, with the similar fury and determination as Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s 400 BLOWS. We are proud to present the new Rialto restoration of THE RUNNER, with new subtitles by Bruce Goldstein and Maryam Najafi, approved by the director himself. THE RUNNER always bears rediscovering as one of the greatest masterpieces of and about childhood that the cinema has ever known.