Amir Naderi is perhaps the original transnational Iranian filmmaker, having made more films abroad (in the US, Japan, Estonia, and Italy) than he made in Iran.  Nevertheless, the Iranian films that brough him to international acclaim – The Runner (1984) and Water, Wind and Dust (1989) – were both clearly part of the first post-Revolutionary wave of Iranian cinema and important templates for his later work.  This is especially the case with Manhattan By Numbers, a film that cries out to be seen alongside Naderi’s own earlier features as well as alongside important first-wave films such as Where is the Friend’s Home (1987), Life and Nothing More (1992), or Nargess (1992).  Naderi’s first New York film certainly bears clear marks of that wave of American independent cinema that was just cresting, and should be understood as part of the “Jim Stark” end of that movement, referring to the American producer who was the most internationally-minded of American independent producers of this period.  But in its use of landscape (in this case urban, and thus closer to Bani-Etemad than Kiarosatmi), as well as its deployment of a quest narrative and frustrated longing for the innocence of childhood (and in this way close to Kiarostami after all), Manhattan By Numbers is clearly of a piece with the Iranian cinema of its day.  In the way that he fully inhabited the cinematic transformations of two very different countries, Amir Naderi was a true transnational filmmaker in a period before this term became common parlance in studies of world cinema.