Entezar, Amir Naderi’s second film for Kanoon – the Iranian institution in charge of producing cultural goods, for children and young adults – was a deft and calculated move away from the gritty street dramas and crime films of the early 1970s that made him famous but also left him feel artistically unfulfilled.
This semi-autobiographical, dialogue-free meditation on puberty and desire was shot in the old city of Bushehr, in southern Iran, and edited by the Iranian New Wave documentarian Kamran Shirdel. The one-line story follows an orphaned boy who, every day, fetches ice for his elderly guardians. He falls for a girl, although he has only seen her hands. Showing Naderi at the peak of his purely visual storytelling, Entezar was a break from the realism of his previous films, allowing illusory images to sit next to documentary moments such as the mourning ritual for a Shia saint. Sizzling with a euphoric view of life and cinema through fixation on light and movement, and dazzling with high sensory sensitivity, this masterpiece establishes in three-quarters of an hour what other films need hours to ramble on.

Ehsan Khoshbakht