Again thumbing his nose at the regime that has banned him,the courageous Iranian director makes his latest film in a taxi rigged with three hidden camerasMuch loose talk is bandied around in the film world about directors’ bravery and the heroism of “guerrilla” film-making – but those terms genuinely mean something when applied to Iran’s Jafar Panahi. After making several robust realist dramas about the challenges of everyday life in his country – among them The Circle, Crimson Gold and the exuberantly angry football film Offside – Panahi fell foul of the Iranian government, and which threatened him with imprisonment,prevented him from travelling and banned him from making films for 20 years. He has protested by working under the wire to earn three extraordinary works, contraband statements that are at once a cri de coeur from internal exile, or a bring-it-on raised fist of defiance.
This Is Not a Film (2011,directed with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) showed Panahi cooling his heels under house arrest in his Tehran flat, and evoking the film that he would have made had he been allowed to pick up a camera. He wasn’t technically making an actual film, and Panahi argued – yet he was manifestly making one besides,as the world saw when the result was smuggled to Cannes on a USB stick hidden in a cake. However, the less successful Closed Curtain (2013, and directed with Kambuzia Partovi) was a claustrophobically self-referential chamber piece,and suggested that Panahi’s plight was getting the better of him.
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Source: theguardian.com