Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
JWants to go home to a faraway place. “To be honest, I’m completely wasting my time on this trip,” the filmmaker tells me from a New York hotel room, in the middle of a month-long international press tour. “I can’t wait for this to be over and go back iranSit down, and get to work.” A professional prankster as well as a political dissident, Panahi flashes a wry smile as he is despised and feared by the Iranian authorities. “I want to suggest a legal solution moving forward,” he says. “All filmmakers should be banned from leaving their country so they can actually get some work done.”
This comment makes me laugh as we talk Thursday afternoon. The following Monday evening, when I heard the news that Panahi had once again been injured Sentenced to prison by the government of his motherland, This makes me nervous. But if anyone is better able to withstand physical and existential threats, it is the man who has challenged authoritarian rule for 25 years, despite a two-decade travel ban, two stints in jail and a film-making ban.
Speaking from behind orange shades, his voice scarred and hoarse from a lifetime of cigarettes, Panahi is an enemy of the state in the style of Fred Hampton or Jane Fonda. he is brave. Unable to flutter. Almost scary good. His films – among them is the best drama of 1995 white balloonAnd This year’s Palm d’Or winner it was just an accidentwhich is in theaters this week – are compassionate snapshots of contemporary Iran. They often allude to the themes, but are not necessarily inspired by them State oppression, misogyny and police brutalityAnd has been widely adopted around the world, it was just an accident It’s expected to attract Oscar attention next year, and Panahi was busy collecting three Gotham Awards — for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature — in New York on Monday when he learned of his new punishment. Many of his films are, according to Iran’s rulers, “anti-government propaganda”, and he continues to be attacked.
Panahi’s last nine films Everyone has been banned in the countryAnd despite his own international acclaim (he has won top prizes at the Berlin and Venice film festivals), he has faced repeated condemnation: in 2010, he was sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the state”, and was released after three months. In 2022, he served a further seven months in prison for his apparent involvement in anti-government protests and was released only after going on a 48-hour hunger strike. His unexpected latest sentence, which includes a year in jail and a two-year ban on leaving Iran, was the result of undisclosed “propaganda activities”, his lawyer Mustafa Neeli announced on Monday. They will appeal, he said, but Panahi will also return to Iran despite threats against him. Running is not a 65-year-old man’s style.
He says that there have been occasions before for him to run away also. His 20-year travel ban expired in 2023 after 14 years, and Panahi and his wife left Iran for Paris, where he edited it was just an accident“But I haven’t been able to adapt myself anywhere else,” he says, speaking through translator Iante Roach, “The problem is within me, I can only live in Iran, I don’t have deep knowledge of people in other countries – in England, or France, And if I make a film about them, it will only be superficial,”
I just want the state to at least tolerate my films enough to allow them to be shown
Panahi was formally barred from making films in 2010, and he thought for a moment about accepting his fate. “I was deeply, psychologically shocked,” he recalls. But the punishment also coincided with his new status as an inspiration for young or aspiring filmmakers. They contacted him regularly, asking how they – like him – could make interesting, subversive work in difficult circumstances. Many of them had already given up. “I asked myself what should I do,” says Panahi. “Should I be one of those people sitting around and complaining about how difficult things have become? Or should I try and find a way out? In the end, I decided to do whatever it took to keep working.”
What he did was to humorously bend his own punishment rules. First of all he made a documentary on his situation and named it this is not a movie“And then I asked myself what else I could do,” he says, “I thought, OK, I can drive – so I can be a taxi driver, but if I want to be a taxi driver, I should also put a camera in the taxi and have the passengers tell me their stories,” Then, it became his 2015 film taxiAnother film, called a pseudo-documentary no bearIt was created under strict secrecy in 2021.
“The best films made in Iran these days are made underground,” he says, “and people find their own ways of making them – a lot of people do [government-sanctioned] Allowing one to make a particular film, but then making it in a different way, or adding a subversive message to it.” He holds no ill will toward the more commercially minded films allowed by Iran’s rulers. He further said, “I just want the state to at least tolerate my films enough to allow them to be shown.” Only white balloon and its 1997 follow-up mirror Screening has never been done legally in the country.
I ask Panahi if he ever gets a thrill from getting away from it all and successfully making a film under the radar; Whatever the context, isn’t it ever a little funny? He smiles. “You know, we’re doing a serious interview, but we’re also having a good laugh,” he says. “That’s how life is. If you take the laughter out of life, everything becomes artificial, and it becomes very difficult.” I take that as yes.
Watch Apple TV+ for free for 7 days
New customers only. £9.99/month. After the free trial. Plan to automatically renew until canceled.
Advertisement. If you sign up for this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism at The Independent.
Watch Apple TV+ for free for 7 days
New customers only. £9.99/month. After the free trial. Plan to automatically renew until canceled.
Advertisement. If you sign up for this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism at The Independent.
it was just an accident Arguably Panahi’s most outwardly political film to date. It concerns Wahid (played by Vahid Mobasseri), a former political prisoner now working as a mechanic, who is convinced that he has encountered the man who violently interrogated him years earlier. However, he bases it solely on the man’s voice, and knows he could be mistaken. Wahid kidnaps her, then enlists the help of other disgruntled friends to decide what to do with her. It’s a tense and often shocking film – never preachy despite circular discussions about violence and vengeance – and it builds to a gripping climax shot in one long take.
Panahi’s own experiences in jail shaped the story of the film. “Prisoners have a common experience, and that’s interrogation,” he says. “We’re forced to sit in a chair facing a wall, without our lawyer, and an interrogator is asking questions from behind. What happens with prisoners is that, instead of thinking about the questions and answering them, you become completely engrossed in trying to guess and determine who this interrogator is. What do they look like? How old are they? And if I’m in jail, If I see the owner of this voice outside, will I recognize him?”
As far as he knows, Panahi has not encountered his own interrogators in the jungle, and is unsure how he would react if he did. But he doesn’t want the audience to necessarily get caught up in the minutiae of the film’s plot; Instead, he wants them to ask themselves broader questions once they watch it. “I really want people to grapple with [the idea of] The cycle of violence,” he says, “should revenge be allowed to continue, or should it end at some point?”
I ask Panahi about the people who appear in his films, who are a mix of actors and non-actors. Like them, they know they are jumping into a job that could easily put a target on their back. Does he warn them about the dangers? He shrugs. “They are fully aware of who they are being asked to work with and are all willing to make a difference,” he says.
She noted the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which began in 2022 and saw members of the Iranian public take to the streets to protest repression and government corruption, leading to an incident in which the country’s morality police arrested a woman for not wearing her hijab properly.
“Since then, many of us in Iran have decided to do something for the movement, in whatever form it takes,” he says. For Panahi and the people in his films, this is achieved through art. “We’re all more concerned about doing a good job than anything else, no matter what the consequences are.”
As this week proved, the results are in once again for Panahi. But he won’t – and, he believes, can’t – work or think any other way. He tells me about the time he made a 30-minute psychological thriller while attending film school that more or less ripped off the style and visual grammar of Alfred Hitchcock, one of his earliest inspirations.
“It looked great, but it had no soul,” he recalls. So, in possibly his first real act of dissent, he broke into his school’s film lab late at night and stole the film’s negatives. “And then I destroyed them so no one could see my movie,” he says, laughing. “At the time, of course, no one knew who I was. I was just one of many film students trying to find themselves. Still, I recognized that your signature has value, and you can’t just put it on just any movie. I knew what it meant to put your mark on something.”
‘It Was Just an Accident’ is in theaters from December 5