IN WHICH JAFAR PANAHI CREATES A NEW ART FORM... "THIS IS NOT A FILM"

Ok, so you guys know about Jafar Panahi, right? He is one of the most successful and talented directors Iran has produced in our century. He’s in a tad bit of trouble right now…  See, Penahi is one of the large group of educated Iranians who are against what the current regime is doing. And he is vocal about it. For this reason, he has been prosecuted and his sentence was 6 years in prison and a 20 year ban on making films, writing scripts or giving interviews. Having been “shut down” a third of the way through the production of his latest film, at the time of the production of this… Let’s call it a documentary for now, he is in his home in Tehran awaiting the decision for his appeal. Panahi, not content with just throwing up his hands and giving up, made the documentary. It was then smuggled out of Iran on an I-phone hidden in a cake, just in time for the Cannes Film Festival.  I mean,  that smuggling story alone deserves a movie made about it I reckon, but I guess that’s for another time and place. Now, it’s a tad bit hard to describe, but let’s try and focus on the actual thing that was smuggled for now.

Panahi is, in essence, stuck in his home in Tehran. He cannot work… Or can he? He first starts off by trying to film himself. That doesn’t work. So he reaches out to a personal friend and documentary film maker, Mojtaba Mitrahmahsb… From this effort emerges… Well, something. The DVD sleeve calls it a “new art form”. I have a feeling they may be right. Penahi, seemingly while he is doing little more than freestyling to the camera, asks a key question : “If you can tell a film, why should you film it?” Penahi starts off by telling us, scene by scene, the film he was interrupted doing.  It is strange, haunting and fascinating to watch as Penahi uses masking tape to mark off rooms on his living room floor and acts out key moments… After all, he cannot film or write scripts. There’s nothing in the court decision about not reading a script that is already written. But anyway, from there, he branches off into a philosophical debate, flashbacks of other films and, perversely, a very strange encounter with the janitor that Penahi films on the spur of the moment… I don’t know… You really have to see it to understand it properly.

Government censorship is a terrible thing at the best of times. I mean, I understand the need for control but in countries such as Iran, this “control” has spilled over into violations of the right to speak freely long, long ago. Throughout history though in most countries where artists have had to content with serious government pressure while they work a lot of ingenuity comes into play. Artists often take the censure and use it as an extra challenge to produce something extraordinary that still portrays the message they want to give. Penahi has achieved this with this particular project and it is this spirit I admire more than anything else. Having been forbidden to film, to write and to even talk about it in an official capacity, his immediate response is to start a project that fits all this criteria – so it is not a film – and yet… It may not be a film but it definitely is something darn similar… I mean, ask the Cannes Film Festival if you don’t believe me. Having been smuggled there the film made it into the official selection. No matter what you call it, film, documentary, installation, interview… It is a wonderful piece of work that demonstrates that even in the face of the most horrific oppression the human spirit will always find a way to fight back. Not necessarily with sticks and stones; but with thoughts, messages and art… I mean, at the end of the day, who needs sticks and stones? A well placed discussion is infinitely more dangerous to censorship… But that, as they say, is another story…