1965: A man with an inscrutable gaze. A heavy, orange-colored and quite obviously American car. The desert around them. In the middle of the desert is a gigantic shipwreck. The man is an Iranian secret agent. The country is in turmoil. His assignment is probably very different from what he thinks it is…
A Dragon Arrives! shows Haghighi on his high point to date. On a visual level, his meditation on paranoia and the dark soul of Iran is ablaze with color. It is of a dramatic force that is incomparable to everything that he has created so far. Even more than before, he now taps into his cinephile vein: A Dragon Arrives! thus becomes an ode to the genius of the Iranian genre film of the 1960s, above all to its realist-inspired crime movies that have already greatly inspired Bildrausch guest Amir Naderi. Back then as well as today, a fiercely paranoid wind blows through Iran – no matter who is in power, one always has to look over one’s shoulder. Film noir was rarely more colorfully bright than this!
