The Market, Ethics, and Self-​Determination in Amir Naderi’s The Runner

The film is set in Naderi’s hometown of Abadan, a major port city on the Persian Gulf near the Iraqi border. Because of its oil refinery and strategic location, Abadan was among the first and most heavily bombarded cities during the war. In a recent interview, Naderi recalls that the city—blanketed in black smoke for years due to the extensive oil fires caused by the bombings—was so destroyed by the war that he was forced to film elsewhere.³ Even so, the actor who played Amiro, Madjid Niroumand, remembers that the reality of the war remained ever-​present during the shoot: the frequent bombings in the area included one that fell dangerously close during a take but, fortunately, landed in the mud and did not harm them.⁴

While the war is referenced only obliquely in the film, the widespread misery and desolate landscape are placed squarely in the foreground. Amiro is seen early in the film scavenging at a garbage dump, surrounded by others in his same state of extreme deprivation. Two boys come to blows as they fight over a discarded object, contributing to the sense of struggle for survival that permeates the film. In this bleak living environment, the recurring presence of vehicles–such as airplanes, cargo ships, and trains–acts as a leitmotif and seems to offer the possibility of escape. As Amiro dreams of overcoming his harsh reality, he watches these vehicles pass by, often chasing after and yelling out to them in vain. The film, in fact, opens with Amiro standing at the edge of the sea frantically waving and shouting to passing oil tankers and freight vessels. In another moment, he calls out to a distant tanker: “Take me with you!”

Yet the film focuses less on any actual attempt by Amiro to escape his circumstances than on his determination to move forward within them. As he brings the few miscellaneous items he has collected at the dump to a trader at an outdoor market, he runs into his friend Mousa, who has come to sell glass bottles gathered from the sea. When Mousa invites him to join in this more profitable venture, Amiro asks specifically about the cost of the necessary equipment (an inner tube), whether the other boys will allow him to join, and whether the bottles are consistently available. In so doing, he is cautiously inquiring about the required capital investment, potential barriers to entry, and likely long-​term profitability before deciding—proving an inherent and instinctual understanding of how the market works.

The two bottle-​collecting expeditions with the boys do not end well, however. In the first instance, as the crates begin to fill, an older boy accuses Amiro of taking bottles he claims to have seen first. Although Amiro insists that he had picked them up first and was therefore entitled to them, the older boy nonetheless snatches the bottles. Amiro fights back, determined to recover his goods, but he stands no chance when the others gang up on him as the newcomer. Amiro’s friend finally convinces the boys to stop, and Amiro walks off, despondent. The second time, the boys work in a harmonious and orderly manner, but their efforts are abruptly interrupted by a natural threat: a shark is spotted lurking in the nearby water. The boys run to shore as a fisherman and other adults rush in, ensuring that they reach land safely. If earlier Amiro lost part of his profit due to a dispute with another boy, here he is in danger of losing a body part and possibly his life. This point is driven home soon afterward as Amiro observes a one-​legged man walking along on crutches. When the boys later ask him why he has given up bottle collecting, he replies: “cause I need my legs.” The potential profit does not warrant the risk of losing his limbs.

At this point, Amiro decides to set out on a new business venture of his own: selling cold water directly to workers along the docks. Each morning he invests in a large block of ice, and then he transforms its gradual melting into a commodity he can sell for one coin per glass. The film even draws attention to the physicality of money: the camera repeatedly captures the accumulation of coins both as they are placed into the ice vendor’s can and as they pile up on Amiro’s stand. This small-​scale enterprise reveals Amiro’s entrepreneurial ingenuity as well as his intuitive awareness of capital investment, labor, and consumer demand.

Rather than dwelling on the loss of family or absence of institutional support, Naderi focuses on Amiro’s personal agency. The film does not offer background or insights into the boy’s past—the focus is entirely on the present, in which Amiro is capable of sustaining himself as he balances his activities in the marketplace with leisure and, later, with his education. At home in the abandoned ship, he washes his clothes, replenishes his drinking water, shares watermelon with a baby bird, grows a small plant in a discarded can, and decorates the walls with pages from magazines. We never see him crying himself to sleep or wistfully watching happy families in the streets. He neither succumbs to despair nor turns to illegal activity. Instead, adapting to his environment, he brings his entrepreneurial ventures to fruition through the seizing of opportunity, modest investment, and disciplined labor.

Throughout the film, Amiro adheres to a strict ethical code: he neither steals nor tolerates theft, as a matter of principle. When a customer rides off on his bike without paying for his glass of water, Amiro abandons his remaining customers and gives chase through a maze of cargo containers until he catches the man.

Although Amiro presumably forfeits part of the day’s earnings by leaving both waiting customers and his water bucket behind, reclaiming what is rightfully his matters more to him than any short-​term profit. On another occasion, when a man steals his block of ice outright, Amiro pursues him until he recovers the melting ice, and then taunts the man by daring him to try and take it back. Amiro’s uncompromising reaction to theft resonates with Murray Rothbard’s conception of property rights as ethically absolute rather than merely instrumental, grounded in the principle of self-​ownership: to steal another’s property is to violate the person himself.⁵ Amiro’s pursuits of his stolen goods are therefore neither acts of pride nor of desperation, but morally necessary assertions of his rights through his own agency.

When the ice thief threatens retaliation, Amiro once again adapts, inventing yet another means to support himself as an entrepreneur.⁶ He invests in a shoe-​shining kit and finds clients at a local café frequented by foreigners, reaffirming his capacity to turn adversity into opportunity. He secures permission to approach customers by paying a small fee from his profits to Mousa’s older cousin. Amiro works tirelessly shining—and at times repairing—shoes, earning greater profits than in his earlier endeavors.

Yet Amiro’s sense of justice and dignity is not always in his own self-​interest. While shining shoes at the café, a blond Anglophone sailor accuses Amiro of having stolen his cigarette lighter. The waiters scatter his boxes’ contents on the ground and then drop the matter when no lighter is found. Amiro, however, remains deeply affronted. He waits for hours near the man’s ship and, when the sailor returns, drunk, confronts him to proclaim his innocence. The sailor, not able to understand the boy, shoves him down, and a brief scuffle ensues. As the man kicks at the shoe-​shining kit in an attempt to destroy it, Amiro cries out: “Don’t break my box, it’s how I make a living!” So intense is his moral outrage at the false accusation that he continues to challenge the sailor, calling him to fight even as he staggers aboard his vessel.

The film not only contrasts voluntary, orderly exchange within the market process with the appropriation of goods by force or fraud, but it also foregrounds the exchanges themselves. First of all, value is shown to be subjective. As Mousa remarks about the bottles, “The foreigners toss them in the sea and we fish them out.” Discarded as worthless litter by their original owners, the bottles are transformed by the boys into commodities that can be sold on the market. In addition, the various exchanges with the shop owner function, in effect, as a demonstration of the market at work. We not only see the boys selling their bottles to the shop owner, but we also witness the latter reselling them in bulk to another buyer, who carries them away in his truck. The shop owner pays Amiro 27 rials for 12 bottles, and the buyer in turn pays the shop owner 95 tomans for 369 bottles. The bottles—worthless to “the foreigners” —are worth 950 rials (1 toman is 10 rials) to the man in the truck. By supplying the precise sums involved in the transactions, the film invites viewers to calculate the profits at each stage. Amiro receives 2.25 rials per bottle, while the shop owner receives 2.57 rials per bottle, yielding a modest gross margin of about 0.32 per bottle. The latter’s profit derives from resale in bulk.

Amiro is shown to be not only a savvy seller of goods (bottles, ice water) and services (shining shoes), but also a discerning consumer. The film even makes a point to capture Amiro’s attention to the cost of his purchases. When told that a bowl of soup he consumed is seven rials, he points out that he had brought his own bread and thus the price is reduced to five rials. When the trader sells him a large light bulb for four rials, Amiro points out he has already given the trader a glass of ice water that costs one rial, and thus hands over only three rials. In this case, each has effectively acted as both buyer and seller, and the exchange of money covers the difference. The theme of the subjectivity of value is highlighted again through Amiro as a consumer when the trader cannot understand what value the bulb could have for the boy. The bulb, moreover, does not even work, allowing us to assume that it had been discarded as worthless by its original owner. Later, we see the bulb hanging alongside smaller ones in his ship; Amiro thus valued it not as a source of illumination but rather as a decorative object.

Amiro’s successive business ventures illustrate the emergence of spontaneous order in miniature. As Friedrich Hayek observed, such order arises not from central planning but from individuals acting on dispersed information.⁷ Each day, Amiro uses his local knowledge—responding to what customers need, what resources are available, and what obstacles threaten his survival—and coordinates his efforts without guidance from authority. His economic activity unfolds entirely outside any formal regulatory framework–in what might be called an informal market. His small enterprises illustrate the positive results of the free market at work even in conditions of great duress.

One recurring scene draws attention not only to the relative price of goods but also to Amiro’s increasing purchasing power through his business ventures: the magazine stand. On his early two visits to the stand near the outdoor café frequented by foreigners, he is treated not as a consumer but as a loiterer. As he leafs through a paperback, the waiter brusquely orders him: “Don’t touch them, kid. Get lost.” At a second stand, he asks for the price of a magazine, but is told—somewhat dismissively—that it is too expensive for him. He instead searches through the selection of discounted aviation magazines. At the third magazine stand, Amiro progresses from the buyer of discounted magazines in a box on the ground to a discriminating consumer who selects four prominently displayed, expensive foreign journals that cost five rials each.

It is during this scene that attention to the price difference between foreign-​language and Farsi magazines leads to the next pivotal phase of Amiro’s development. When the vendor informs him that the Farsi magazines cost less, the boy replies that he cannot read and just looks at the pictures. The man’s remark that “all boys your age can read” prompts Amiro to ask to register at a local school, resolved to learn. Realizing that Amiro lacks adult supervision, the attendant does not contact the police or an orphanage to take him away. Instead, he treats the boy as a self-​reliant individual. After a brief phone call, he offers Amiro the chance to attend night classes for illiterate adults, which Amiro gladly accepts since he needs to continue working during the day. This scene brings home the fact that Amiro lives completely removed from any state authority—there are no welfare programs, police actions, compulsory schooling laws, or economic regulations shaping his life. Yet the film does not present this absence of institutional intervention as a failure. Rather, it shows that, in the absence of such external factors, Amiro exercises personal agency and is in charge of his own life. Subsequent sequences intercut school lessons with shots of Amiro alone, reciting the Persian alphabet aloud, repeating the letters like a mantra until he has memorized them. The same resilience evident in his economic activity is thus displayed in his disciplined pursuit of literacy, as a testament to his self-​determination.

The film likewise devotes attention to Amiro’s leisure time, both alone and with the boys who collect bottles. Their activities—which include singing, bike riding, soccer, and footraces—run the gamut from moments of total unison to episodes of fierce competition. Whereas cycling through the streets turns naturally into a contest of speed, and soccer is by nature a team sport, the footraces above all are depicted as contests of intense rivalry and endurance. For Amiro, competing in races with the other boys is not simply about winning, but about pushing himself in order to test his own limits and possibilities. In one episode in which the boys run after a moving train, the other boys stop running when the winner has touched the back of the train. When the boys ask Amiro why he continued running even after another had won, he responds: “Because I want to know how far I can run.” The races are about more than speed—they are a test of endurance, agility, and physical dominance.

The film’s climactic sequence culminates in a footrace among the same group. In the distance, their prize awaits—a large block of ice which is melting under the heat of a blazing oil-​field fire. In their desperation to win, the boys sprint with ferocious determination, pushing each other out of the way, tripping each other, and jumping over fallen bodies. After a close race, Amiro is the first to reach the block of ice, now significantly melted. His initial reaction is to grasp it as a trophy and wave it in the air in triumph. His joy is heightened by the physical relief of pressing the block against his sweating cheeks and licking it, savoring those drops of cold water in the face of the oil fire. Yet when he turns and sees the desperate faces of the other boys, straining with thirst as they reach out to him, he relinquishes the ice so that they, too, can find relief. This situation is the very antithesis of his first encounter with these same boys, during which he fought over ownership of the bottles. Amiro’s gesture of sharing the ice is replicated as each boy soothes his face and licks the ice before passing it along to the next boy in line who eagerly but patiently awaits his turn. Amiro’s generosity does not negate the race; it completes it. The camera alternates between the boys passing along the ice and Amiro euphorically slapping the drops of water on the barrel and sending them sparkling into the air. This celebratory scene thus illustrates the compatibility of competition with generosity, compassion, and shared human pleasure.

Throughout the film, running acquires different meanings depending on the context, but it ultimately serves as a symbol of self-​empowerment, fueled by the desire for self-​realization in the face of poverty and struggle. Naderi has explained that this forward motion encapsulates his philosophy of life: “Movement and ‘go get it’—nobody can stop you, even an airplane.”⁸ Although early in the film Amiro runs after airplanes that function as emblems of escape and rescue, the final shot presents Amiro facing the camera, rapidly shouting the letters of the alphabet, as an airplane takes off behind him. He no longer dreams of vehicles that might carry him away. Equipped with his own two feet, his growing knowledge, and his ingenuity, he stands self-​propelled. Nothing, this ending suggests, is going to stop him.

Nonetheless, the studies we have encountered largely overlook the film’s pervasive engagement with economic questions, tending instead to express a broadly negative view of capitalism in general. Amiro’s succession of ventures to sustain himself are grouped together and minimalized as “menial,” “small,” and “odd” jobs.⁹ While ignoring the positive workings of the market in relation to Amiro’s business activities, Amir Barati concludes, on the contrary, that “Naderi also portrays the go-​getter, semi-​capitalist politics of rivalry which caused immense problems in Iranian society for years to come.” In decrying “the politics of fierce competition for personal gain at the cost of Others,” he goes so far as to draw a parallel between the boys’ footrace and the war: “As a game based on out-​injuring the opponent, the defeated ones represent the dead, while the ones who desire power of the machine can narrate the war as a victory for themselves.”¹⁰ Such a reading not only ignores the cooperative nature of economic exchange painstakingly illustrated in the work sequences of Amiro’s life, but also neglects to acknowledge that the winner happily shares his prize with the others in a final moment of mutual joy.

Given Naderi’s successive scenarios of exchanging goods and services, along with his sustained attention to value and prices, the film can almost be read as a lesson in how a free market economy enables individuals to escape abject living conditions. It is important to note that the film was produced by the Iranian Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon). In a recent interview, Naderi recalls that he originally proposed to the Institute his idea of a film that would speak directly to children, giving them hope for a better future amidst the bleak living conditions of the present: “I want to make a movie. I want to make it proud for the kids, about becoming somebody.”¹¹ Accordingly, the emphasis Naderi places on the themes of market exchange, ethics, and learning can be seen as part of the film’s didacticism, giving younger audiences a useful insight grounded in the workings of the adult world.

Naderi has described the film as a semi-​autobiographical work, drawing heavily on his own childhood experiences of being orphaned at the age of six. Although he was later raised by an aunt, he has characterized himself as a “street kid” and personally experienced the jobs he later scripted for his protagonist. Like Amiro, Naderi enrolled in school relatively late, at the age of nine. It is no coincidence that their names—Amiro and Amir—so closely echo one another. Largely self-​taught, Naderi learned the craft of filmmaking by watching movies at the cinema where he worked, and would go on to become one of the foremost figures in Iranian cinema. Naderi has also revealed that he co-​wrote the script of The Runner as an act of defiance after his earlier films were banned despite their commercial success. Shortly after the film’s release, he emigrated to the United States and continued to make films exploring themes of displacement, confinement, and endurance.¹² More recently, he co-​authored the screenplay of Ramin Bahrani’s reinterpretation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451.¹³

Similarly, the lead actor, Madjid Niroumand, fled Iran with his brother a few years after the filming in 1987 and was granted refugee status first in Norway and later in the United States. He has since worked for more than two decades in student services at the same college in California he once attended. In reflecting on his life after the film, Niroumand recognizes in the figure of Amiro both a source of inspiration and a deep personal connection: “He changed the direction of my life.… A lot of it was a reflection of Amiro in life for me, really from the time I fled. That’s why it’s uniquely kind of identical. It’s like it was my life afterwards.”¹⁴

Watching The Runner is particularly poignant, not only as a mirror of the lives of both its director and its actor, but also in light of the current protests against Iran’s repressive political regime. The demonstrations began in response to an economic crisis—a steep depreciation of the rial and soaring inflation—and quickly evolved into broader political dissent, challenging strict social laws and the country’s authoritarian system. These protests have been led largely by young people, with women playing especially prominent roles, and have been met with massive lethal force and a state-​imposed internet blackout. In their own way, these youths are running defiantly toward their rights and personal freedom. The Runner thus endures as a landmark of Iranian cinema and as a powerful testament to autonomy, resilience, and self-​determination.