Amir Naderi

Due to smaller distribution and advertising budgets, Naderi's films are not as well known as most Hollywood films. Despite that and the lack of recognizable actors in most of his films, his work tends to find distribution (mainly in Europe and Japan), and he has earned a great deal of critical acclaim. Naderi’s films and photography are also frequently the subject of retrospectives at major festivals and museums throughout the world. Lincoln Center in New York, the city that has been his home for the past 20 years, offered a complete retrospective of his work in 2001, as did the International Museum of Cinema in Turin, Italy in 2006. The most recent retrospective of his work was screened at the Busan International Film Festival, the largest in Asia.

His 2011 film Cut was shot entirely in Japanese and stars Hidetoshi Nishijima.

His film SOUND BARRIER (2005) had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the prestigious Roberto Rossellini Prize at the Rome Film Festival.

He was named a Rockefeller Film and Video Fellow in 1997, and has served as an artist in residence and instructor at Columbia University, the University of Las Vegas, and New York's School of Visual Arts. His US films have premiered at the Film Society of Lincoln Center/ MoMA's New Directors/ New Films series, the Venice, Cannes, Tribeca, and Sundance Film Festivals.

Amir Naderi first came into the international spotlight with films that are now known as cinema classics, THE RUNNER (1985), and WATER, WIND, DUST (1989). THE RUNNER is considered by many critics to be one of the most influential films of the past quarter century. After expatriating to New York in the early '90s, Amir Naderi continued to produce new work.

Naderi continued to make films after the Iranian revolution. His 1984 film The Runner is one of the seminal films of this period in Iranian cinema. The Runner gained wide critical recognition on the international film festival circuit and it brought wider attention to what has since become the celebrated "postrevolutionary art-house" cinema in Iran. The Runner and other films Naderi made in the 1980s helped develop and promote some of the visual and narrative strategies that would also appear in the works of other Iranian art-house film directors. However, these films already hinted and anticipated the director's desire to leave Iran; Hamid Naficy called them "proto-exilic" films. By the 1990s, Naderi emigrated to the United States.

In 1971, his directorial debut, GOODBYE, FRIEND, was released in Iran.

Amir Naderi is one of the most influential figures of 20th century Persian cinema. He developed his knowledge of cinema by watching films at the theater where he worked as a boy, reading film criticism, and making relationships with leading film critics. He began his career with still photography for some notable Iranian features. In the 1970s, Mr. Naderi turned to directing, and made some of the most important features of the New Iranian Cinema.

Amir Naderi (Persian: امیر نادری ‎ (Persian pronunciation: [æˈmiːr-e naːdeˈriː] ), born 15 August 1946, in Abadan) is an Iranian film director, screenwriter, and photographer. He is best known for The Runner and Vegas: Based on a True Story.