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).

Introduction by Cinema Tehran founder Arya Ghavamian on Sunday, February 15th