Cinema
The Night It Rained
اون شب که بارون اومد
Kamran Shirdel · 1974
Synopsis
A newspaper reports that on a rainy night, near Gorgan, a schoolboy saw that the water had undermined the railway line, set fire to his jacket and waved it over the tracks to stop a train, saving its passengers. The film crew goes to the spot and questions everyone: railwaymen, the governor, the chief of police, the schoolteacher, villagers. With each testimony the story changes, until it is no longer clear who saved whom, or what really happened.
Context
Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Arts and completed in 1967, on a text written with Esmail Nouri-Ala, the documentary was banned at once. It was shown in public only in 1974, at the third film festival of the capital, then banned again until the revolution. The way the witnesses contradict one another has led to comparisons with Rashomon, and it has been seen as a satire of official Iran in the sixties. It was restored and presented in Bologna in 2015.
Who it is for
A documentary in Persian, in black and white, of about thirty-five minutes. Note that the testimonies deliberately contradict one another, and that the viewer has to sort them out.
Prizes and reception
Grand Prize at the Tehran International Festival in 1974, and regarded as its author's masterpiece and as a key work of the Iranian New Wave.