Jafar Panahi’s latest illicitly-made film, “Taxi,” premiered to enthusiastic applause at the Berlin International Film Festival Friday, while he and his fans wait to see how the regime will respond.
This is Panahi’s third movie since the Judiciary banned him from making any films for 20 years. Only silence greeted the foreign screenings of the first two movies as the regime apparently concluded that jailing Panahi would only produce more trouble for the regime by fomenting an international uproar.
Panahi, 54, was detained for a documentary he tried to make on the unrest following Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election and officially banned from making more films for 20 years for “acting against national security and making propaganda against the regime.
He was not allowed to leave Iran to attend the Berlin festival, but sent along a statement about his drive to keep working despite the risks. “I’m a filmmaker. I can’t do anything else but make films. Cinema is my expression and the meaning of my life,” he said.
In “Taxi,” Panahi offers his impressions of contemporary Tehran from behind the wheel of a cab, filming with a dashboard camera.
Each person he offers a lift has a story to tell.
His first fares, two strangers going the same way, launch into a political debate about Sharia law and capital punishment.
The man argues that car parts thieves should be hanged, while the teacher in the back seat says the state ordering the death penalty has done little to foster the social order. “After China, we have the most executions!” she protests, as the discussion grows increasingly heated.
A third man gets in and, when the feuding pair finally get out of the taxi, says he recognizes the director Panahi in the driver’s seat.
Thus begins a film within a film in which the man, a seller of pirated film DVDs (a profession Iranians will have to rely on to see this film), jokes with Panahi about the acting skills of the first two people in the cab.
Panahi continues to drive and is a genial master of ceremonies, treating his sometimes hysterical fares with politeness and good humor.
The tone shifts again when he picks up from school his precocious young niece, a budding filmmaker who has been taught the strict rules governing movie distribution.
As she pulls out a small camera and turns it on the director, she explains what she has learned from her teacher about movie-making: all women must wear a headscarf, there must be no physical contact between men and women, political and economic debate must be avoided, and most of all: no “sordid realism.”
Panahi humors her, but when he recognizes a prominent human rights lawyer by the side of the road, he stops to pick her up. The woman charms Panahi’s niece.
When the director confides that he just spoke to a man he believes interrogated him while he was forced to wear a blindfold, the lawyer responds, “Such simplistic tactics.” She says the regime uses the technique to give dissidents the maddening sense that they could never escape surveillance, with some preferring actual imprisonment to paranoid “freedom.”
The last passenger he picks up is a woman who says she is going to visit the family of Ghoncheh Ghavami, a British-Iranian dual national who was then in jail after having tried to enter a stadium to watch a male volleyball match.
The international uproar over Ghavami’s jailing was immense—on a par with the reaction several years ago to Panahi’s imprisonment. And, as Panahi was released but not allowed to leave Iran, so Ghavami has since been released—and she is also barred from leaving Iran. It appears the regime may have found a technique for throttling its critics that falls short of imprisonment.
Panahi’s “Taxi” builds to a climax in which the extent and limits of the director’s liberties are revealed. Agence France Presse reported that drew a strongly positive reaction at a press preview in Berlin.
“Taxi” is one of 19 contenders for the Berlin Festival’s Golden Bear top prize to be awarded February 14.
Panahi’s last movie, 2013’s “Closed Curtain,” was also shot in secret, in the confines of his villa on the Caspian Sea. It won a Silver Bear in Berlin for best screenplay, drawing protests from the Islamic Republic.
His first movie made in secret was filmed in his Tehran apartment and named “This is Not a Film” to mock his pursuers.
ilm festivals in Berlin, Venice and Cannes have invited Panahi in recent years to sit on their juries, each leaving a symbolic empty chair for him since he was prevented from leaving the country. “We will keep inviting him until he can attend,” Berlin Festival director Dieter Kosslick told reporters last week. But Panahi’s wife and niece were able to attend.
So far the only reaction from Tehran has been a comment from the head of the Cinema Organization of Iran, Hojatollah Ayubi, who criticized the Berlin Festival but made only passing mention of Panahi.
Ayubi complained that the Berlin Festival’s leadership was politicizing matters. “I regret that you wish to drive everybody in a taxi of new misunderstandings about the Iranian people by screening a film made by a director who has been banned by law from making films – nevertheless, he has done exactly that. I am delighted to announce that the director of ‘Taxi’ continues to drive in the fast lane of his life, freely enjoying all of its blessings.”
Ayubi said, “I, like many other lovers of cinema, hear the ominous sound of the footsteps of politics at the Berlin festival. I, like the rest of you, wanted Berlin to remain a refuge of culture and art, but it seems that someone preferred politics to art. The sound of politics can be heard, and the bricks you are laying course upon course will quickly build a new Berlin wall around your festival—a wall that could be much higher than the Great Wall of China.”
The Hollywood industry newspaper Variety carried a review of “Taxi,” concluding that the film “is talking about something much bigger than Panahi’s own personal situation, but rather the dilemma of how to keep telling meaningful stories in a country that places so many prohibitions on an artist’s ability to express him- or herself. The result is a film of quiet but profound outrage, laughing on the surface, but howling in anger just beneath.”
The Huffington Post’s Nina Rothe said, “I don’t get the constant persecution of Jafar Panahi. If there is one filmmaker who manages to show Iran and the Iranian people with kindness, care and a healthy dose of self-criticism, it’s Panahi. Because he talks about people he loves, a country he adores despite his problems, he should be allowed to criticize some of the negative aspects. Yet no one, no documentary I’ve watched and definitely no other filmmaker makes me yearn to visit the streets of Tehran, to meet its people and perhaps share a juice with Mr. Panahi himself—the way he does. I’m just saying, hope the right eyes are reading it….”
Panahi’s film carries no credits at the end in an effort to protect those involved in its production.