Bashu, the Little Stranger

Director: Bahram Beyzaie

1985 / 120min / 4K DCP

Acclaimed as the “Best Iranian Film of All Time” in a 1999 poll conducted by the Persian film magazine Picture World, Bashu tells the story of the titular 10-year-old Afro-Iranian boy who, orphaned after a bombing raid on his village in southern Khuzestan province—the film was made in the midst of the devastating Iran-Iraq War—makes his way to the north of the country, where he is hesitantly taken in by a headstrong woman (Susan Taslimi) with two children of her own—all of them speaking in the unfamiliar Gilaki tongue. Pointedly prevented from screening in its country of origin until a year after the war’s end in 1988, Beyzaie’s film is an immersive, poetic tale of displacement and adaptation, of destruction and rebuilding, quietly revolutionary in its humanity.

Distributor: mk2 Films

Restoration in 4K at Roashana Studios with the support of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon).

Part of Travel Companions: Bahram Beyzaie & Amir Naderi