A Dragon Arrives! 2016

This film presents itself as a true story, reinforced by interviews with the director and others, including Mani Haghighi himself. It frames the narrative around the idea that the movie we watch is connected to the sound recording of Brick and Mirror, a project associated with Mani Haghighi’s grandfather, Ebrahim Golestan, and it suggests that a film crew is attempting to build a feature using that historical thread.

On February 2, 1964, an orange Chevrolet Impala winds through an ancient cemetery and heads toward a sunken ship, setting a mood of mystery from the very start. The central events revolve around the death of an exile on the island of Qeshm, described in the film as a Marxist-Leninist figure. A SAVAK agent Javad Charaki travels to Qeshm to investigate the murder and discovers that the exile has indeed been killed. He encounters a series of strange phenomena on the island: after each burial in an abandoned cemetery, an earthquake shakes the ground, and locals whisper that a dragon lives beneath the cemetery, a myth whose presence seems to shape the island’s fate. The title’s dragon motif is not just superstition—it becomes a key thread that threads through the investigators’ increasingly perilous inquiries.

To deepen the mystery, the agent relies on two friends, a geologist Behnam Shokoohi and a sound engineer Keyvan Haddad. Together, with Charaki’s guarded patience and their own curiosity, they return to the island to uncover the truth behind the murder and the oddities that haunt the burial sites. As their investigation unfolds, a tangled web emerges: a Marxist has had a relationship with the daughter of a local woman, Halima, and the father kills the man in a revenge-driven act, staging it as a suicide. Charaki also tries to conceal this part of the story, adding to the tensions that bind the trio as they dig deeper into the island’s secrets.

Days later, Halima is found pregnant in the ship’s morgue, and the film follows how her child comes into the world as Halima herself loses her life. In the face of danger and political pressure, the three friends—Charaki, Behnam, and Keyvan—end up raising the child together, a fragile unit formed under the shadow of attempted repression and mounting threats. The investigation is repeatedly stalled by SAVAK, and the trio’s pursuit of answers takes a darker turn: one of them is killed while attempting to escape, another manages to flee Iran, and the last is killed in a missile attack, leaving the fate of the remaining pieces of the story ambiguously unresolved.

As the film closes, it circles back to its provocative title, A Dragon Arrives, explaining that the English rendering nods to Bruce Lee’s famous Enter the Dragon. Haghighi has explained that there was extensive discussion among those involved before the title was ultimately accepted, underscoring the sense that memory, myth, and political danger all converge in the island of Qeshm.

In the end, the film blends documentary-like interviews, mythic possibility, and political intrigue to paint a portrait of how history and memory can collide with danger and obligation. The result is a story that feels both specific to its era and universal in its meditation on truth, storytelling, and the costs of seeking answers in a world where power would rather quiet the truth than face it.