In the village of Lamelang near the northern city of Gorgan, a schoolboy is said to have witnessed that a flood washed away and undermined some part of a track ballast. Inspired by the similar heroic act of an iconic school book character Dehghan-i Fadakar (literally meaning devoted peasant), the schoolboy sets fire to his jacket to warn the train crew which allegedly saved the lives of two hundred people.

In the second volume of his four-volume book A Social History of Iranian Cinema Hamid Naficy states that “Pahlbod [the Minister of Culture and Art] decided to offer Shirdel the opportunity to make a film about the heroic village boy, a film that was to be positive and not critical of the government. With his MCA crew, Shirdel traveled to the site of the incident, the village of Lamelang near the northern city of Gorgan, but without a screenplay or a filming plan. There, he encountered very different versions of the event, causing him to decide to center his film not on the singularity but on the multiplicity of reality; not on a single Truth, but on many truths” (130).

The film starts with a few short sequences of newspapers rolling in a publishing machine which leads to the first page of the newspaper with the bold title “The Epic of the Gorgan Village Boy,” indicating that his bravery in saving the lives of two hundred passengers calls to mind the heroes of antiquity. On another page of the newspaper and at the top of the boy’s photo, it is indicated in bold fonts that the heroic village boy gets a reward while the voice-over excitedly repeats the same confirming accounts. However, as the film proceeds, the audience comes across a layered narrative juxtaposing opposing views that produces a hilarious effect making it hard to believe the newspapers.

The school head, the teacher, the governor, the chief of police, the Kayhan newspaper reporter, the publisher of the Shomal-i Iran newspaper, the boy himself, and his teacher tell different, contradictory stories: while the Kayhan newspaper reporter confirms that the boy did the heroic act, the publisher of Shomal-i Iran confidently rejects the whole story and believes that such an incident had never happened. Interestingly, Shirdel used a few inserts to reinforce the implications of the opposing reports on the incident: a scene that shows a railroad worker’s hands holding a rosary while repeating, “It’s a lie,” as well as slides of different government documents.

The display of the Shah’s government letters at different parts of the film directly references authorities and their commission, wittily playing on their influence on the production and their double standards by banning the film. Meanwhile, the Godard-like references to the film production such as the display of the camera, Shirdel, his crew and the clapboards before some

scenes all self-reflexively create a Brechtian distancing effect on the viewers. The effect powerfully makes the audience rationally reflect on the situation and judge it despite the impossibility of drawing any sound conclusion. The result is an amusingly astute ethnographic observation of the people’s socio-cultural values and how difficult it is to display clear-cut and objective documentation of such a complex situation where everyone’s story differs from those of the others—an extraordinary, layered narrative that leaves the audience with feelings of playfulness and at times sarcastic confusion, loss, and disorientation about what is true and what is a lie. However, one thing is sure: Shirdel’s playful and entertaining treatment of the incident encourages ambivalent layers of perception of the film, making Shirdel’s documentary an astonishing example of a modernist and avant-garde film in Iran. The audience sees parts of a puzzle that are supposed to come together to make a clear picture; however, they not only give a clear picture but also leave the audience with a comic sense of confusion. The film does not reveal the truth and leaves the audience with a conceptual blank space that is not going to be filled.

Although Shirdel completed The Night It Rained in 1967, the film was banned for seven years and was not publicly screened due to its controversial treatment of a social incident. The film won “The Best Documentary Film” award at the 3rd Tehran International Film Festival (1974), seven years after its production. The reception of Shirdel’s movie by the authorities of the time was ambivalent just like its subject of investigation: it was initially banned by the government and was later granted an award after seven years!

The “Epic” tale is not simply narrated but re-narrated from a different point of view, none of which the audience can trust, leaving them in an unresolved yet exciting and comic puzzle. The multiplicities of narratives that are supposed to reveal the true nature of the incident make it more complicated. The film might remind the Iranian audience of the famous folk saying: yek kalagh chel kalagh [literally meaning, one crow forty crows, loosely similar to the English saying “Tell Tales”). To see Shirdel’s documentary as a simple observation of reality is simply not to see the film. Shirdel’s investigative engagement with the incident through various reports and interviews makes his documentary socially conscious by providing the social context of its production. The documentary’s style was not (and still is not) consistent with that of Iranian mainstream films. Shirdel’s reliance on the documentary and cinema verité styles represents an important break with most cinematic practices of the time and with the viewing habits derived from them.

The key idea in Shirdel’s documentary is that multiple narratives serve to cast doubt. The diversified levels of narration in The Night It Rained deliberately challenge the ability of documentaries in representing reality. The voice-over narrator (by the acclaimed dubber/actor/director Nosrattolah Karimi) comprises the first “level” of narration which is disrupted by other narratives. The interviews constitute other levels of narration embedded in the first level of narration. The subtle irony lies in that the narratives, no matter how partial or biased, cancel each other out. Ultimately, the audience is left in a hilariously complicated network of comments and cannot decide whether they are true or false. Perhaps Shirdel’s film is a commentary on the fragility of truth and its unattainability through documentary film.

“Kamran Shirdel first studied architecture and urban planning at Rome University in Italy, but in the third year of his studies (1959), he decided to switch to filmmaking and enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia to learn filmmaking by being exposed to Michaelangelo Antonioni’s and Jean-Luc Godard’s films” (119). Similar to some of Godard’s movies, Shirdel’s documentary style combined with observational camera work, where interviews with the village’s authorities and people are intertwined with one another to depict a complicated and contradictory rendering of this reality. The film seems timeless in its depiction of multilayered reality in a microcosmos of Iranian society that can be extended to a bigger picture of the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of the country—a situation that not only has not been fixed but has also been worsened to this day. Perhaps Shirdel’s short documentary is a historical witness to the lack of responsibility, clarity, accuracy, and trust in the Iranian government, its news, and even people’s beliefs.