The Night It Rained

The story goes that a schoolboy from a village near Gorgan in northern Iran noticed that the rain had washed away the ground beneath the rails and stopped a train by setting his coat alight. The newspapers wrote it up as an act of heroism. Rather than verify the account, Kamran Shirdel sets those telling it side by side: railway workers, the governor, the chief of police, the village teacher, the pupils and the villagers. Each says something different, and the thirty five minute film turns into a puzzle about how an event is assembled and turned into an official story. It was completed in 1967, cost the director his government post and could not be shown for seven years. It was finally screened at the Tehran Film Festival, where it won the prize for best short film.