Earlier this year, the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi was detained and ordered to serve a six-year prison sentence – the latest politically motivated attempt to silence an artist who has been banned from making movies since 2010. Despite the ban, Panahi has remained a creative thorn in the side of the Iranian authorities. His provocatively entitled This Is Not a Movie (2011) was smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive hidden inside a cake and premiered to great acclaim at Cannes. His next two features, Closed Curtain (2013) and Taxi Tehran (2015), earned him a Silver and Golden Bear respectively at the Berlin film festival, while 3 Faces (2018) won best screenplay at Cannes.
This latest stripped-down work from the world’s most quietly defiant cineaste has already (deservedly) picked up the special jury prize at Venice and the award for cinematic bravery at the Chicago international film festival. Meanwhile, in Miami, where the director was given the film festival’s Precious Gem award, an audio message recorded in prison found Panahi wryly declaring: “I wish that I could make films instead of receiving awards” because “I have dreams that go beyond all the awards in the world.” And what dreams they are!
