SIFF 2017 Trailer: A Dragon Arrives! (Ejhdeha Vared Mishavad!)

Iran | 2016 | 105 minutes | Mani Haghighi

Police Inspector Hafizi wakes up on a desert island and must piece together the puzzle of his abduction while working a murder case in this delightfully unconventional and entertaining Iranian mashup of gumshoe noir and phantasmagorical ghost story.

It's 1965, and a flame-orange Chevy Impala pulls up to a shipwreck on the island of Qeshm in the Strait of Hormuz. A police inspector, a sound engineer, and a geologist get out; they've come to investigate the suspicious death of a banished political prisoner. Inside the wreck, the walls are covered in diary entries, literary quotations, and strange symbols. Fifty years later, all this evidence, plus subsequent recordings by the intelligence services—recordings that suggest that the inspector and his colleagues were arrested—is found in a chest passed down to the film's director, Mani Haghighi. This twisty tale of spies and counterspies winds its way through multiple genres—noir, mockumentary, mystery, ghost story—and is rife with surrealist black humor and references to Iranian popular cinema of the '60s and '70s. It may be an allegory for the country's political present and recent past, or it may be a supernatural tale of graveyard earthquakes and dragons that make men speak in foreign tongues. Either way, it's a spectacular exercise in flash and panache not to be missed.