Rasoulof’s lawyer, Iman Mirza-Zadeh, announced last week that the filmmaker had received confirmation that the 20-year-ban on his traveling outside Iran had been removed. Organizers of the film festival said Rasoulof was expected to reach the festival before it wrapped up. He did not. And there has been no explanation.
“Things are too Kafkaesque in Iran,” said James Velaise, the French distributor of Rasoulof’s film “Be Omid e Didar” (Goodbye). “Just because some people say you can go, that doesn’t mean you can. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”
“Everyone would have loved him to turn up even at the last minute, but we know it’s not going to happen,” said Velaise.
Rasoulef won the best director award in the Un Certain Regard section. His prize was acceptrd by his wife, who wore a grey silk coat and a loose headscarf. The film ironically tells the story of lawyer in Tehran who is trying to obtain a visa to leave the country,
Iran has accused the Cannes Film Festival of playing politics by showing only Iranian movies backing the regime’s opponents. In December, the courts sentenced Rasoulof and fellow director Jafar Panahi to six years in jail, plus a 20-year ban on filmmaking and foreign travel. Both are currently free on bail pending an appeal.
Despite the travel ban, Panahi was seen in Cannes last Thursday—on film. His latest movie, “In Film Nist” (This Is Not A Film), was smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive in a cake, and screened at the film festival, outside of the competition.
Showing a day in the life of Panahi, 50, while he awaits the verdict of his jail sentence appeal, the “film” is full of ambiguities. Panahi performs a film script censored by Iranian officials, raising the question of when a film is a film. What sounds like gunshots is simply fireworks during the traditional Now Ruz festival. As the film’s co-director and cinematographer, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, films Panahi with his camera, Panahi records his counterpart with an iPhone.
“You call this a film?” Panahi asks.
Mirtahmasb spoke at a festival press news conference the day after the screening saying, “We have decided to take the risk of whatever we are doing, whatever the situation. We are not combating the regime politically.… We prefer being free to being heroes in prison.” Mirtahmasb said no official comments had been made in Iran about the Panahai piece or Rasoulof’s film. Panahi watched the news conference via Skype, said festival organizers.
Serge Toubiana, the head of the Cinematheque Francaise, a film archive in Paris, said it was important that films like Panahi’s and Rasoulof’s were shown at Cannes and elsewhere. “The more we talk about them, the more we circulate them here, the more they live in Iran.”
Held since 1946, a year after the end of World War II, the Cannes Film Festival had honored Panahi in 2003 and 1995 with prizes for two of his films.
This year, the festival’s eight-member jury headed by Robert De Niro, gave the top prize, the Palme d’Or, to the “The Tree of Life” directed by Terrence Malick.
