In Focus: Amir Naderi

Three UK premieres at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

2–6 February 2025

Curated by Arta Barzanji and Shaghayegh Raoufi

ABOUT THE PROGRAMME

In Focus: Amir Naderi brought together three UK premieres from the filmmaker’s international period, concentrating on work made after his departure from Iran in the mid-1980s. While Naderi is widely recognised for films such as The Runner and Water, Wind, Dust, the substantial body of work he has made across the United States, Japan and Europe has received considerably less sustained attention.

Rather than treating this international period as a break from the cinema Naderi developed in Iran, the programme considered both its continuities and transformations. His recurring fascination with movement, searching, physical endurance and the relationship between people and their environments persists, but is reshaped by new cities, languages and production conditions. Naderi’s cinema becomes increasingly difficult to place within familiar national or stylistic categories: precisely the instability that makes these later films so revealing.

The programme began with Manhattan by Numbers (1993), Naderi’s first feature made in New York, in which a desperate search for money and a missing friend gradually becomes an encounter with the city itself. Sound Barrier (2005) pushes the recurring motif of searching towards abstraction, using sound, editing and the sensory experience of its deaf protagonist to transform a confined New York setting into an intensely material audiovisual space. The final film, the Japanese production Cut (2011), turns Naderi’s lifelong commitment to cinema into its subject, following a filmmaker who literally puts his body at risk for the medium he believes in.

Presented with Naderi’s participation across the three screenings, the programme offered a partial reconsideration of an international body of work that resists the familiar critical narrative through which his cinema is usually encountered.

PROGRAMME

Manhattan by Numbers

Amir Naderi
USA, 1993
85 min

Sunday 2 February 2025, 8pm

UK PREMIERE

A laid-off newspaperman has twenty-four hours to find the money for his overdue rent. Searching New York for an old friend who might help, he gradually discovers that the friend has disappeared. Naderi’s first English-language feature turns this increasingly desperate search into a portrait of the city itself: its streets, precarious lives and rhythms of movement. The film extends Naderi’s longstanding interest in wandering and pursuit into a specifically New York landscape, where narrative urgency continually opens onto observation and encounter.

Introduced by Shaghayegh Raoufi.

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Sound Barrier

Amir Naderi
USA, 2005
107 min

Wednesday 5 February 2025, 8:30pm

UK PREMIERE

A deaf and non-speaking eleven-year-old boy searches obsessively for an audio cassette containing his mother’s final words. Concentrated largely within two confined New York spaces, Sound Barrier transforms this search for memory and identity into an experiment with the very materials of cinema. Naderi builds an intensely physical audiovisual world through fragmented editing, repetition and the paradox of organising a film around sound from the perspective of a protagonist who cannot hear it.

Introduced by filmmaker Amir Naderi.

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Cut

Amir Naderi
Japan, 2011
133 min

Thursday 6 February 2025, 6:30pm

UK PREMIERE

Co-written by Shinji Aoyama and starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Cut follows a young filmmaker who discovers that the money financing his films ultimately came from the Yakuza. Forced to repay the debt, he begins allowing customers to beat him for money while reciting the titles of films he considers essential. At once cinephilic and deeply ambivalent about cinephilia, Cut turns devotion to cinema into something bodily and punishing, making Naderi’s longstanding interest in endurance inseparable from his meditation on the medium itself.

Followed by an in-person Q&A with Amir Naderi, hosted by Arta Barzanji.

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PRESS & CONVERSATIONS

Interview: Amir Naderi
Cinema Year Zero

Thomas Atkinson speaks with Naderi during the ICA retrospective about filmmaking across Iran, New York and Japan, his approach to sound and editing, and the importance of place to his cinema.

Amir Naderi: Fragmented Modernities
Ultra Dogme

An essay responding to the ICA programme that traces continuities and transformations across Naderi’s Iranian and international filmmaking, from Waiting and The Runner to Manhattan by Numbers, Sound Barrier and Cut.

An essay placing Naderi alongside Bahram Beyzaie through their contrasting approaches to childhood, place, displacement and cinematic form, from their early work in Iran to the different paths their careers took abroad.