Jafar Panahi thought for a moment that the world was at his feet when he landed at Tehran airport in May 1995. The Iranian filmmaker, then 34 years old, returned from the Cannes Film Festival, where he had attended the world premiere of his acclaimed first feature film. The White Balloon.
A film in the tradition of the great classics in social realism, according to the film press. The simplicity and kindness with which Panahi portrayed the underbelly of Iranian society – through the encounters of a 7-year-old girl trying to buy a goldfish – earned him three awards, including the prestigious Caméra d’Or for best debut.
Film colleague Abbas Kiarostami, his mentor and also scriptwriter of The White Balloon, tried to instill a sense of reality in the apple of his eye in the arrivals hall. Filming will be anything but easy from now on. “How many prizes have you won?” Kiarostami wanted to know. “Three,” Panahi counted. To which Kiarostami replied, “Then you have three thousand new enemies.”
glorified thug
At the time, Panahi did not immediately understand what his teacher meant. Until Kiarostami two years later with The Taste of Cherry was awarded the Golden Palm, the top prize in Cannes, and upon returning home to the airport had to flee from a collection of violent extremists. A glorified vigilante, sent by the government, Kiarostami knew. “That’s when I understood who we had to compete against,” says Panahi.
This anecdote is from the short documentary Where Are You, Jafar Panahi? from 2016, in which the director takes a car ride to visit the grave of Kiarostami, who died earlier that year. Since Panahi was arrested in mid-July and sentenced to an outstanding six-year prison term for “anti-government propaganda,” the documentary (viewable in its entirety on YouTube) has grown in significance.
In the car, Panahi talks about filming in Iran, about Kiarostami’s legacy for Iranian film history, about the stranglehold of film censorship. The short film can be viewed as a manifesto; an unvarnished look at the thinking of Iran’s most important dissident filmmaker of the past 25 years.
Easy target
His most recent arrest has been accompanied by growing unrest in Iran. The population has been taking to the streets for months to protest corruption and rising food prices, which the regime has responded to with increasing repression. Critical film and documentary makers, who raise social problems in their work, are an easy target in that regard.
When Panahi films himself in Where Are You, Jafar Panahi? the words of warning about thousands of new enemies of Kiarostami have penetrated the very fabric of his existence.
Six years earlier, in 2010, Panahi was arrested for allegedly working on a film about Iran’s Green Revolution: after presidential election irregularities (won by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), millions of Iranians took to the streets in protest. Panahi went on hunger strike and was released on bail after three months. Later that year, he was given a 20-year ban on work, speaking and travel. A sentence to six years in prison remained unenforced until last month.
For the past twelve years, despite his work ban and lingering prison sentence, Panahi has continued to work miraculously. Out of necessity, he often turned the camera on himself, instead of going out into the country to focus on others. He called his first film after his 2010 conviction teasing This Is Not a Movie: To get the film at the Cannes Film Festival, he smuggled the video file out of the country on a USB stick hidden in a cake. Panahi made one thing crystal clear: even if the regime forces him to his knees, he will continue to find ways to tell the stories he wants.
Good characters with western tie
This approach caused a constant split: his work is showered with praise abroad, but creates a source of tension in his home country and for himself. Iranian critics accused his work of siahnamayideliberately portraying the country negatively.
In Taxi TehranAwarded a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2015, the director offers sharp insights into what filming in Iran is all about. Here he impersonates a taxi driver and films countless (staged) encounters, with a seller of illegal DVDs, for example, or a human rights lawyer.
The scene with his niece, who has to make a film as a school assignment, is very telling and who, in the passenger seat next to Panahi, teaches the laws of appropriate cinema. Especially the many prohibitions stand out, such as: violence, physical contact between man and woman, foreign music, close-ups of women and good characters with a western tie. Permitted and encouraged: good characters with the names of prophets, respect for Islamic reason and dress code, at least one scene of prayers.
Considered spies
His films before the 2010 sentencing are less self-conscious, but no less critical. In his third movie The Circle (2000), awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Panahi sketches the men-oppressed lives of eight veiled women. Panahi incorporates a recurring joke in the stories in which the women state that they can’t even smoke for a while, because smoking in public is forbidden for women.
Also in Offside (2006) he cares about the fate of Iranian women: here a group of women tries to visit Iran’s decisive qualifier for the World Cup. The football stadium is off limits to them, so they dress up as men.
“Maybe the films I make in other countries are the government’s dream,” he muses Where Are You, Jafar Panahi? ‘Cinema about social problems, which shows on an individual level the misery that people have to deal with. Who makes those in power think, motivates them to seek solutions to problems in the country. But here, in Iran, we are accused of dramatizing reality. We are considered spies paid by the United States or the Mossad. That’s the price you pay when you live here.’
3 x Jafar Panahic
Panahi’s six-year prison term follows a wave of arrests of prominent Iranian film and documentary makers. Documentary maker Firouzeh Khosrovani was arrested last May. Mohammad Rasoulof followed, after publishing a letter of protest. Panahi, in turn, was arrested when he tried to contact Rasoulof.
After a few days in jail, Panahi in 2010 asked why he was actually incarcerated. Wasn’t he just producing a movie? He didn’t have a weapon or a bomb with him, did he? “A guard told me my practices are more destructive,” he said in the documentary Where Are You, Jafar Panahi? “They see a camera as a greater danger.”
Panahi’s conscription coincided with the first two years of the First Gulf War between Iran and Iraq (1980-1988). He had taught himself to film with an 8mm camera from the age of 10 and got a role as a cameraman for the Iranian army during the war.