An eye-popping, brain-teasing Iranian film noir in dazzling primary colors, A Dragon Arrives! is one of the strangest and most exhilarating works from maverick Iranian director Mani Haghighi, whose Men at Work (PSIFF 2007) and A Modest Reception (PSIFF 2012) both showed in the festival, and who appears as himself in pseudo-documentary scenes.

The plot? Natty detective Babak Hafizi looks into the suspicious death of an exiled political prisoner on the remote island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf in 1965. While running the investigation, he happens upon several even bigger mysteries: a haunted cemetery prone to earthquakes, and the disappearance of Halimeh, the daughter of a surly, shark-hunting ophthalmologist.

"Puzzling yet thoroughly entertaining, A Dragon Arrives! lands somewhere between a mockumentary, a ghost story and a hard-boiled detective yarn, with a pinch of Indiana Jones tossed in. Set on the surreal-looking desert island of Qeshm, which can double for Monument Valley should the latter ever sink into the sands, it playfully throws a handful of characters into a search for some incredible truth that supposedly lies buried in a haunted cemetery." Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter