On September 8, 1978, there was a bloodbath on the streets of Tehran, which, in retrospect, marked the beginning of the end of the Shah's regime. Thousands are said to have lost their lives in this massacre. But what happened to the victims? How many were there really? And what happened to the bodies? Around six months after the fall of the old order, Naderi began filming this documentary. He felt it was now time to answer the one question that has been on so many people's minds since Black Friday: Where are my loved ones? Mass graves are dug; (parts of) corpses await identification; the more concrete the dimensions of the crime become, the more monstrous and incomprehensible it seems. The last quarter of the movie is silence.
The following year, Naderi made a sequel, more of a project than a story, The Search 2 (Jostoju 2, 1982); this time he went to the front, filming the Iran-Iraq war. More corpses. And while in the first film the good guys and bad guys could still be assigned relatively clearly to individuals, groups and institutions, here the boundaries became blurred. As far as can be ascertained, The Search 2 has never been shown officially in Iran and is otherwise considered almost impossible to see. Things are hardly any better for The Search: Bildrausch is showing the only copy still playable.
