A 12-year-old orphan with a habit of seeking out his potential parents takes his friend along on a journey through the wastelands on the outskirts of Tehran. Seemingly a children’s folk tale, Safar is so visually singular that it evades easy breakdown. It is allegorical, but allegory is the engine; visual density the result. When one speaks of Bahram Beyzaie, one speaks of a maze of citations. While along the way, various forms of image- making are evoked – movie posters, peep show, photography – the search for parents becomes a search for the primal image from which the film has emerged: steps for Eisenstein, architecture for Murnau, a crippled man for Buñuel, wheels for John Ford. An agonizing dream bordering on a nightmare, the film overflows with excess. Objects and people multiply rapidly, growing like mushrooms in a landscape so devastated by dirt and pollution that it becomes an environmental plea. In the smoggy, hazardous zones of abandoned objects – old wooden doors, carriages – a country has discarded its history at a frantic pace without replacing it with anything new.

Ehsan Khoshbakht