Not a Film: Films of Jafar Panahi

Panahi’s Palme d’Or win for his It Was Just an Accident at this year’s Cannes Film Festival made him only the fourth filmmaker to take top prizes at all of Europe’s Big Three festivals, and was a rousing victory for cinema-as-dissidence. Beginning his career as an assistant to Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi burst onto the international film scene with 1995’s feature debut, the fable-like, Kiarostami-penned The White Balloon, only to soon find himself in ill-favor with the authorities in his native Iran, who banned his run of socially critical films beginning with 2000’s The Circle from domestic release before legally forbidding him from further filmmaking activity and placing him under house arrest in 2010—not that this did much to slow down the resourceful and irrepressible auteur. A survey of a body of work that brings together profound compassion for those at society’s margins, a neorealist sense of in-the-streets immediacy, and real, indomitable political conviction.