It’s the most autobiographical of the five films he’s written and directed, says Nazer, who replaced the first actor he chose to play Yahya, “because he wasn’t enough like me”. The film, which won the audience award at the Edinburgh film festival last year, is both a love song to Iranian cinema, set in a gloriously photogenic landscape of derelict desert settlements, and a heartwarming story of childhood ingenuity and friendship. Being of lowly status, Yahya is only allowed to collect plastics, with disastrous results when he is discovered by the local bully to have a mysterious gold figurine secreted beneath his jacket. Like the director himself, Yahya pursues a passion for the movies in the teeth of parental opposition, staying up late to watch old classics lent to him by the supervisor of a scrapyard, to whom children sell bags of rubbish they have scavenged from a rubbish tip.
The protagonist is the nine-year-old son of an Afghan immigrant, eking out a living in an isolated Iranian village. This global refugee story is a quiet presence in Nazer’s new film, Winners.
It took six gruelling months, often travelling on foot, to reach Europe, where his uncle put him in touch with a Kurdish family who had found asylum in Scotland and were willing to help, as they had been helped by his family back in Iran at an early stage of their own migration. “I didn’t have a destination at the time, I just wanted to go somewhere else,” he says. Nazer had avoided military service, and had no passport or visa, so his uncle paid for him to be smuggled across the border into Turkey. So basically, if you want to go into cinema or continue with theatre, this is not your place. “He said, after you get a red flag in this age, they’re not going to let you work. His father, who ran a family confectionery business from a factory outside Tehran, had been opposed to his career choice from the start, but one of his uncles was on his side. As a fledgling theatre director, he had been “red-flagged” – a possibly irredeemable offence – for putting women on stage in the holy city of Mashhad. H assan Nazer was in his first month at university in Iran when he realised that he would have to leave his homeland to fulfil his dream of becoming a film-maker.
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