This visual tour-de-force by the director of The Runner (SFIFF '87) was completed in 1985, just before the filmmaker moved to the U.S., but not released in Iran until 1989. A work of overwhelming elemental power, it illustrates the ongoing struggle for survival that Iran's desert population faces in its battle with the cruel environment. A teenage boy, somehow separated from his family, searches for any traces they may have left behind, but their drought-stricken village has been abandoned. Frustrated and desperate, he wanders in circles through a shockingly ravaged clime in which he has increasingly hallucinatory encounters. "Shot in one of the most desolate places imaginable, a dried-up lake on the border of Iran and Afghanistan, the film is an almost abstract confrontation of man and nature at its worst...(It) may be taken as an allegory of the Iranian people, or maybe of the entire Third World struggling against its fate" (Variety). (AS)