Getting to the bottom of a story can be a daunting task, especially in Iran, and especially when you do your fact-checking through sources with agendas to push, policy prescriptions to fill, positions to hold on to. It sounds like the latest topic of discussion among Iranians on Clubhouse. It’s actually the plot of a documentary from 1967 by Kamran Shirdel. In The Night It Rained, a filmmaker sets out to investigate the truth behind a sensational story about a village boy who is said to have saved a train from derailing. Every newspaper editor and government official visited by the narrator offers a conflicting account, contradicting the boy and the villagers. The film echoes the fate of many frustrated Iranians today who have no voice in the way they are covered in the media in Iran or abroad, no platform to object to those who purport to speak and make decisions on their behalf. The truth gets buried and the observer is left no more the wiser.
