Jafar Panahi

Jafar Panahi (born July 11, 1960, Mīāneh, Iran) is an Iranian director whose films are critical depictions of Iranian society.

As a teenager, Panahi studied film at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehrān, where he first met Abbas Kiarostami, who taught there. Panahi served in the military during the Iran-Iraq War, and in the early 1990s he made several documentary shorts for Iranian television. He was the assistant director on the final film of Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, Zīr-e darakhtān-e zeyton (1994; Through the Olive Trees).

Panahi’s first feature film was Bādkonak-e sefīd (1995; The White Balloon), about a young girl who wants to buy a goldfish but loses her money down a sewer drain. The drama—which was written by Kiarostami—earned Panahi the Caméra d’Or, the prize for first-time directors, at the Cannes film festival. In Ayneh (1997; The Mirror) a young girl decides to make her own way home after her mother does not pick her up at the end of the school day despite the fact that she does not know her address. The story makes an abrupt turn when the actress playing the main character announces that she is tired of playing a role and wants to go home. Panahi also wrote the screenplay for The Mirror, and he penned the scripts for several subsequent movies.

Panahi’s films took a more overtly political turn with Dayereh (2000; The Circle), about women in contemporary Iran. Two of the central characters are convicts escaping from prison, which allowed Panahi to point out the irony that they had exchanged their small jail for what some would consider the larger jail that is being a woman in Iran. In 2003 he directed Talā-ye sorkh (Crimson Gold), which begins with a robbery at a jewelry store. The rest of the film is a flashback that follows the robber, a poor pizza deliveryman, as he encounters inequities and injustice. Offside (2006) centres on six young female soccer fans who try to sneak into a qualifying match for the World Cup between Iran and Bahrain on June 8, 2005. Women are prohibited from attending sporting events in Iran, so the fans disguise themselves as men. Some of Offside was filmed clandestinely on the day of the actual match.

Panahi backed opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi in the presidential election of June 2009 and later during the Green Movement protests that followed the Iranian government’s declaration of Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the winner. In July Panahi was arrested at the funeral of Neda Agha-Soltan, a protester who had been killed by government police; he was later released. While making a movie that was set during the Green Movement protests, he was arrested again in March 2010. In December 2010 Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and banned from filmmaking, traveling abroad, and giving interviews for 20 years. He remained free, however, while appealing his sentence.

Despite the harsh sentence, Panahi entered the most active phase of his career. He and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb directed Īn Fīlm Nīst (2011; This Is Not a Film), which depicts a day in Panahi’s life while he awaited the result of his appeal, denied in October 2011. The film was made clandestinely in Panahi’s Tehrān apartment and was smuggled out of Iran inside a USB stick hidden in a cake.

Panahi was placed under house arrest but nevertheless made Pardah (2013; Closed Curtain), directed with Kambuzia Partovi. A screenwriter (Partovi) goes into seclusion at his seaside home, but his solitude is disturbed by a young woman fleeing the police. As in The Mirror, the story is broken by real life, when Panahi appears as himself, and the characters try to get him to finish their story. Panahi secretly filmed Closed Curtain at his own seaside home with a small crew.

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In Taxi (2015), Panahi has been reduced to driving a cab, with his sole contact with filmmaking being the dashboard camera that is supposed to protect him from robbery. The film is reminiscent of Kiarostami’s “car films” like 10 (2002), but in a more comic vein, and culminates in a long conversation about cinema with his niece, Hana Saeidi, who must make a “distributable” short film for school. Taxi won the top prize at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival. In Se rokh (2018; 3 Faces), Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari undertake a road trip to find a young girl whose family bars her from pursuing an acting career.

In July 2022 Panahi went to an Iranian prison to obtain information about a director who had been arrested. Guards there detained Panahi, and shortly thereafter Iran’s judiciary announced that it was enforcing his six-year prison sentence from 2010.