Is Davandeh (The Runner) available online to watch?

Yes. Davandeh streams on K-Time with no geo-blocking or VPN needed. Sign in, press play, and watch on any screen — TV, phone, or browser.

Koja mitonam filme Davandeh ro bebinam?

K-Time has Davandeh available to stream right now. No extra download required — watch through your browser or the K-Time app on your TV or Android phone.

Who directed Davandeh and what else has Amir Naderi made?

Amir Naderi directed Davandeh in 1985. He also directed Ab, Bad, Khak (1989) and Manhattan by Numbers (1993), working across Iran, the United States, and Japan over a career spanning four decades.

Is this filme irani suitable for family viewing?

Davandeh is a drama about a child's struggle for survival and education — no violence or mature content. It is suitable for older children and adults, though younger viewers may find its slow, contemplative pace challenging.

Davandeh

Name: Davandeh
Genre: Drama
Released: 1985
Duration: 94 min
Cast: Abbas Nazeri, Ali Pasdarzade, Alireza Gholmzade, Majid Niroumand, Musa Torkizadeh

Director: Amir Naderi

Cast: Abbas Nazeri, Ali Pasdarzade, Alireza Gholmzade, Majid Niroumand, Musa Torkizadeh

Davandeh (The Runner) is a 1985 Iranian drama film directed by Amir Naderi, following a barefoot orphan boy surviving on the margins of a southern port city, whose raw hunger for dignity and education transforms into an unstoppable drive to run — and to become more than what the world has assigned him.

What is Davandeh about?

Amiro is a street child scraping by in the port city of Bandar Abbas, doing whatever work he can find — washing bottles, fetching water, racing ships along the shore. Fatherless and homeless, he occupies a rusting hulk by the water's edge. His world shifts when he grasps that schooling is the door to a different life. Entering a classroom for the first time means confronting mockery from other students, but Amiro refuses to be pushed out. The film's emotional spine is his fierce insistence on belonging — and on a school competition where children race to recite the full alphabet in a single breath, a test that becomes a reckoning with everything he has endured.

The K-Time take

Naderi's camera stays low and close, matching the eye level of a child who has never been sheltered. The film is nearly wordless in spirit — Amiro's face, his bare feet on hot asphalt, and the relentless coastal wind carry the story. Critics have long placed the film among the finest of Iranian poetic realism, and its influence on later Iranian auteur cinema remains unmistakable.

Cast & crew

The film stars Abbas Nazeri as Amiro, a non-professional child performer whose physical presence is the entire emotional register of the picture. Ali Pasdarzade, Alireza Gholmzade, Majid Niroumand, Musa Torkizadeh, and Shirzad Bashkal round out the cast. Director Amir Naderi, who later moved to New York and Japan, is regarded as a foundational figure of Iranian art cinema.

Context & significance

Davandeh was shot in 1984–85 during the Iran–Iraq War, in the port city of Bandar Abbas in the south of Iran — a world of dust, tidal flats, and working-poor children largely invisible in Persian mainstream culture. For diaspora viewers, the film carries a double resonance: it is both a document of a pre-revolutionary social landscape that many families fled and a universal fable about what it costs a child to simply insist on learning. Naderi's minimalist approach — no melodrama, no musical score to tell you how to feel — asks the audience to sit with Amiro's reality rather than observe it from a comfortable distance.

Where & how to watch

Davandeh is available on K-Time. The film is presented in its original Persian audio without subtitles — the visual storytelling is so powerful that dialogue is rarely the primary carrier. Stream it on the web, your TV, or your phone with no geo-blocking and no VPN required. Cancel anytime.