As a filmmaker, he was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's photography of urban experience and everyday life, as well as the aesthetics of Italian neorealist cinema, such as location shooting and nonprofessional actors, looser narrative structures, and a focus on the plight of poor and working-class people.

The Runner gained wide critical recognition on the international film festival circuit and brought wider attention to what has since become the celebrated "postrevolutionary art-house" cinema in Iran.

Despite that and the lack of recognizable actors in most of his films, his work tends to find distribution (mainly in Europe and Japan), and he has earned a great deal of critical acclaim.

Lincoln Center in New York, the city that has been his home for the past 20 years, offered a complete retrospective of his work in 2001, as did the International Museum of Cinema in Turin, Italy, in 2006.

[7] Amir Naderi continues to produce works of new generation of film directors such as Andrei Severny's Condition (2011),[8] Naghmeh Shirkhan's Hamsayeh (2010) [9] and Ry Russo-Young's Orphans (2007).