The Cinematheque

Amir Naderi’s cinema—and its ritualized sense of autobiographical coming-of-age—began intertwined with Abbas Kiarostami’s. The two were close friends and collaborators on Experience, Kiarostami’s first feature-length directorial effort. Naderi generated the story and co-wrote the script about a teenager named Mamad at ​“the age for learning” and his attunement to Tehran’s working routines. The hypnotic beauty, from cinematographer Alireza Zarrindast (Close-Up), anticipates shots that would recur across Kiarostami’s career while subtly establishing the ​“uneventful” moments that inaugurate a sense of adulthood. Naderi’s Waiting, released one year later, was his breakthrough. With even less dialogue than Experience, the film teases out the mysterious force of a daily sequence of events. Our anticipation of each moment in that sequence—a trip across town for ice—draws on both arid suspense and spectacular phenomena. Naderi would push the visual ideas of Waiting even further in The Runner.

“Experience is the most intricate of [Kiarostami’s] short features … His background as a graphic artist comes to the fore in his striking compositions of documentary images.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“It’s easy to see Mamad as Kiarostami’s young self, but in fact [Experience] was penned by Amir Naderi, whose own upbringing was unimaginably impoverished … The film is an [ironic] subversion of a sub-genre famous in Iranian cinema: the poor-boy-falls-for-rich-girl movie.” Tina Hassannia, In Review Online

“Waiting is a very personal film, a childhood memory … It’s like a dream, and in dreams there is no dialogue, only images.” Amir Naderi

Experience
تجربه
Iran 1973
Abbas Kiarostami
56 min. DCP In Farsi with English subtitles

Waiting
انتظار
Iran 1974
Amir Naderi
48 min. DCP In Farsi with English subtitles