Jafar Panahi | The auteur of dissent

There’s a scene within the 2015 film Taxi Tehran the place a vendor of counterfeited international film CDs use a taxi, pushed by the director of the film enjoying himself, to make a sale. Whereas mainstream administrators rue counterfeits, Jafar Panahi observes the transaction with an expression of sorrow and understanding. The Iranian director, who needed to shoot most of his films in secrecy and smuggle them out of his nation, in a flash drive hidden inside a birthday cake in a single occasion, additionally offers some phrases of recommendation to the younger purchaser who’s an aspiring filmmaker. The books and flicks accessible are already made, Panahi says to the younger man, one should look past what’s in entrance of him.

However Panahi, mockingly in a way, did all through his profession what he suggested the younger man to not do. He turned his lens to what was in entrance of him and confirmed it to the world regardless of the Iranian authorities branding him an “enemy of the state”. They banned him from making films or leaving the nation, and imprisoned him on the infamous Evin jail. Standing underneath the highlight on the Cannes Riviera final week, holding the distinguished Palme d’Or for his “revenge thriller” It Was Simply an Accident, Panahi expressed hope that his society may get to a spot the place nobody is advised what or what to not do and what or what to not make.

Impressed by his experiences in jail, It Was Simply an Accident is born from the inventive resistance of authoritarianism that’s current all through his filmography, together with The Circle, Closed Curtain, Offside, and This Is Not a Movie. Panahi remembers how, throughout his imprisonment in 2022 for fees of collaborating within the Inexperienced Wave motion following the controversial re-election of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, he was blindfolded throughout interrogation with questions coming from behind him. He says voices with no faces play an enormous position within the minds of prisoners, and his newest film takes off with this side. The film centres across the ethical dilemma amongst a gaggle of former prisoners after kidnapping a person whose boots made the sound considered one of them had heard whereas being tortured in jail. However they don’t seem to be positive whether or not he was certainly the torturer or not, creating the core battle of the film.

Social filmmaker

Cannes 2025 was Panahi’s first journey out of Iran in 15 years after the nation’s prime court docket quashed his conviction. It was additionally the primary time in that interval that he was watching considered one of his films at a cinema with an viewers. Panahi, who describes himself as a “social filmmaker”, says the presence of viewers for his films and the flexibility to see their response in individual would have made his works rather a lot higher. However the lack of viewers didn’t cease him from framing the streets of Tehran. He took his digicam by way of the modifications of Iranian society. Panahi says he at all times portrays the reality and actuality round him, and his films earlier than 2022 had girls in headscarves and veils as seen within the streets.

He remembers listening to of the protests towards the obligatory costume code sparked by the loss of life of Mahsa Amini whereas being in jail, and seeing girls with out scarves whereas on a hospital go to from jail. And his films publish imprisonment confirmed the silent protest of girls with out scarves, he says, just like the courageous girls who selected to disobey the codes.

Whereas Panahi returned to Iran to a cheering welcome after the Cannes triumph, it’s nonetheless unclear what awaits him at house. He had made his newest movie, like most of his works, in secrecy with out submitting its script to the authorities for scrutiny as is stipulated. Iran has already sought clarification from a French envoy over a French Minister’s reward of the movie whereas conservative critics have disregarded Panahi’s achievement. However Panahi says his return is in solidarity with the ladies who’ve opted to go towards the orthodox ethical system. “I simply made a film,” he has mentioned, “which isn’t as brave as what the ladies, who will likely be unknown to the world, are doing. Everybody will know if I’m arrested, however nobody will hear of them. That’s the reason I need to return”.