Jafar Panahi – A Life In (and Out) of Pictures

Upon learning that the venerable, contentious Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s latest picture – the resourceful and innovative drama Taxi – had been crowned the latest recipient of the prestigious Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival, it was the auteur’s niece, and star of the movie, Hana Saeidi, on hand to collect the top award.

For Panahi is banned from travelling, following the confiscation of his passport, due to his conviction back in 2010, where he was found guilty of spreading anti-government propaganda through his movies, and placed under house arrest. But that’s not all, the state imposed a 20 year ban on him from making movies. Taxi, however, is his third since.

His first since being creatively suppressed (or so they’d like to think) was This Is Not a Film, which was famously smuggled into Cannes Film Festival having been downloaded onto a USB stick and stuffed inside a cake. What followed was Closed Curtain, which then leads on to his latest, Taxi – where he plays himself, posing as a cab driver and picking up passengers (played by non-professional actors) along the way, giving the viewer a candid, shrewd insight into contemporary society in his native country – and in particular in Tehran, through conversations he has with those entering into the vehicle, as a soap opera plays out in the back seat.

Filmed covertly, this is indicative of a courageous, dissident filmmaker who puts the art-form above anything else, risking it all to remain a storyteller, to share his ingenuity with anybody lucky enough to see it. Panahi’s career has been littered with gems, where he has often put women first, at the centre of his narrative, ranging from the likes of The Circle, to his tour de force, the profound 1995 picture The White Balloon; to the acclaimed comedy drama Offside, about a group of Iranian girls who are incensed on entering a football stadium dressed up as boys, in spite of the laws in place that disallows them entry.

Though we’re not able to witness fictional, narrative pictures such as those mentioned, this ban on Panahi is igniting a sense of defiance from him, and is culminating in creative, unique pictures, unlike anything we’ve seen come out from a nation with an ever blossoming film industry. There’s a neorealism akin to the likes of Abbas Kiarostami and an inclination for melodrama shared by Asghar Farhadi – who won the Academy Award for A Separation. But Panahi is unlike anybody else.

Taxi is just a sign that Panahi is still striving to make movies, and while in this instance he may be the driver, he remains the passenger throughout, observing, carefully, with an astute eye for the subtle nuances of everyday life, providing a comprehensive portrait of the Iranian capital city. So for all of those determined to put a stop to this man’s means of communication with the world, and halt his artistic license, he continues to defy the odds and present a remarkably high calibre of movie, in a way that he always has done, and how he will no doubt continue to do – no matter who may try to stop him.

As the Iranian author Hamid Dabashi famously once said, “Panahi does not do as he is told – in fact, he has made a successful career not doing as he is told”.