‘The Runner’ Is a Gem of the Iranian New Wave

“The Runner,” Amir Naderi’s stylized memoir of his boyhood in Iran, is a notable feat — a movie at once objective and subjective and single-minded throughout. Shooting from the viewpoint of an illiterate street kid, Naderi employs a mature artist’s disciplined technique to celebrate a child’s new-minted vision of his hardscrabble world.

Long unseen, “The Runner” opens on Friday for a two-week run at Film Forum in Manhattan, where it had its U.S. theatrical premiere in 1991. Crisply restored with improved subtitles, it is no less timeless and elemental.

Limned against the sky, then seen collecting scrap metal amid a horde of destitute scavengers, the 11-year-old Amiro (Madjid Niroumand) goes on to fish beer bottles out of the harbor, sell ice water in the marketplace and work as a shoeshine boy in a dockside cafe. Life involves coping with bullies and handling deadbeat customers and their false accusations. Looking beyond his surroundings, Amiro uses his earnings to buy old magazines with pictures of airplanes and his spare time to race with a gang of kids — he is the smallest and most indefatigable of the group.

The movie’s self-possessed young star, whom Naderi spotted modeling in a sports magazine, inspired comparisons to the neorealist child actors of “Shoeshine” and “The Bicycle Thief.” Naderi’s technique is equally noteworthy. “The Runner” is admirably lean and remarkably well-constructed. The sound design is deliberate. The camera placement, often at Amiro’s height, is precise. The editing is inventive. Shot during the Iraq-Iran war, it was impossible to film in Naderi’s hometown, the southern port Abadan; instead “The Runner” seamlessly cobbles together locations from nearly a dozen cities. (Naderi has cited Orson Welles’s geographic patchwork “Othello” as a precedent.)

Now 76, Naderi is a pioneer of the Iranian new wave, having completed a half-dozen features before the 1979 Islamic revolution. “The Runner” was produced by the same progressive entity, Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, that funded Abbas Kiarostami’s early films. Completed in 1984, it was the first Iranian production to attract international attention, shown the following year at the Venice Film Festival. (Leaving Iran in the 1990s, Naderi lived in New York for a decade before moving on to Japan and, more recently, Italy; Niroumand, whose escape from Iran at age 16 is the subject of a recent documentary short, “A Boy’s Own Story,” grew up to be a college administrator in Costa Mesa, Calif.)

Reviewing “The Runner” when it opened here in 1991, the New York Times critic Stephen Holden praised the film for using Amiro’s eyes to find “beauty and wonder as well as squalor in Abadan’s grimy sunsets, polluted harbor waters and dusty railroad depots.” In effect, the movie naturalizes the urban environment. The light is often dazzling; the array of bottles floating in the harbor is bewitching. While acknowledging that every object in Amiro’s world has its price, “The Runner” has a subtle fairy-tale quality. Amiro lives alone on a deserted tanker. Politics and religion are absent — as are women (perhaps a post-revolution expedience). A commitment to individual freedom seems absolute.

Paradoxical to the end, “The Runner” concludes with a near-silent tumult of fire and ice, and a sense of triumph founded on the realization that the adult Amiro made this movie.

The Runner

Through Nov. 10 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org.