Mirza Riza Kirmani, the shah’s assassin, is the subject of several prints—the first of which shows him in the guise of Travis Bickle, the lonely and depressed antihero of the film Taxi Driver. Set in night-time Tehran, the rumpled and slightly deranged Mirza Riza stands outside a cinema advertising Taxi Driver, while parked behind him is an antique Paykan taxi.
Several surviving photographs of Mirza Riza (c. 1850–1896) picture him as a ragged, chained prisoner. Here, dressed in a tunic with blue jeans and only cloth shoes, Filizadeh depicts the assassin at a critical moment between his past as an impoverished, petty merchant who was jailed for his activist beliefs, and his present self, a man lost in the big city surrounded by neon signs and posters, wandering aimlessly with nowhere to go in the moments before he shoots the shah.
