Director Spotlight: Jafar Panahi

Days after Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, I began a journey through his career, unaware that I would also be embarking on several other journeys along the way. It’s no secret that Panahi is a thorn in the side of the current Iranian regime. As we see in other oppressive environments, the imposition of restrictions on artists only make their art more resonant. Still, I didn’t expect his trajectory as a filmmaker to so sharply reflect the evolution of his identity over the years – rather than fading with the pressures of governmental scrutiny, his attitudes become   even more pronounced.

The White Balloon (1995)

There are three distinct phases in Panahi’s career. His first two films center on children, featuring seemingly simple narratives with everyday themes. Both paint morality portraits of Iranian society as it was in the 1990s, primarily through the experiences of their secondary characters. In The White Balloon (1995), a young girl wants to buy a goldfish with the money her mother gave her. Along the way, she encounters street performers trying to swindle her, indifferent merchants focused only on business, and others who genuinely want to help.

The Mirror (1997) begins in the same vein, following a child trying to get home after her mother fails to pick her up from school. As she navigates Tehran, she overhears people discussing their own worlds, revealing dangerous societal mindsets that become ingrained from an early age, such as the taxi driver who believes women should submit to men. But it’s also in this film that Panahi first showcases his experimental side, featuring an unexpected twist and a breaking of the fourth wall.

The Circle (2000)

A blend of fiction and documentary – or mockumentary, more accurately – is introduced, which became a recurring motif in his work. Personally, I believe this style fits perfectly with Panahi’s vision of cinema and its social purpose. After all, what better way to portray real life and social issues than by blurring the lines between reality and fiction?

Yet, in his next three films, Panahi didn’t follow this path. Instead, he opted for something that would define the rest of his professional and personal life, cementing the identity markers for which he will always be remembered. The Circle (2000) is the first film where he places adults at the center of the story. It’s also his darkest work up to that point, with his critiques of post-revolution Iran’s social inequalities becoming far more aggressive. The central theme is the oppression of Iranian women – a subject he returns to repeatedly throughout his career.

The title is particularly fitting because the film’s narrative loops back, completing a full circle. Stories of persecuted, wronged, and discriminated Iranian women, seemingly disconnected yet all part of the same social fabric, bespeak the roles forced upon them in a deeply patriarchal society. The film was banned in Iran (and, 25 years later, still is!) but Panahi managed to bring it to the Venice Film Festival, where it won the highest prize of the Golden Lion on one of the world’s biggest cinematic stages.

Crimson Gold (2003)

Panahi continued his path with Crimson Gold (2003), focusing for the first time on a man, demonstrating that Iranian society’s inequalities extend beyond the subjugation of women. Just as dark (if not darker) than its predecessor, it is at times a difficult film to follow, but its rawness also allows it to deliver unexpected emotional blows. There’s a striking scene near the end where the top floor of a luxury high-rise is starkly contrasted with Tehran’s lower classes. The film brutally emphasizes the idea that some places are unattainable, and the poorest will die trying to reach the unreachable, often losing themselves along the way. It’s a sharp critique of capitalism and how the obsession with material wealth restricts personal freedom through an illusion of possibility.

Finally, Panahi concludes his disparity phase with Offside (2006). Here, he returns to the role of women in society, elevating their forms of resistance. The film, which would later prove instrumental to real-world law changes, takes an ironic tone, exposing the hypocrisy of laws that even those enforcing them struggle to justify –  the nation's ban on women attending football matches led to deaths and FIFA intervention. Iranian women have recently been permitted to attend live football matches – albeit with restrictions – but the film remains relevant, both for its contribution to the cause and for women’s rights in general.

Offside (2006)

Iranian authorities, displeased by such a critical voice emerging from within the country, had long sought to silence Panahi. This is nothing new in Iran; the nation’s recent history has as much about repression as it does resistance. Due to his films, the turbulent political climate at the time, and his support for movements seeking regime change, Panahi was formally arrested in 2010 alongside his wife and daughter, under the charge of “gathering propaganda against the system.”

At the time, he was filming The End, a film about protests in Iran’s streets. The footage was seized and has never seen the light of day. After serving only two months of a six-year sentence due to international pressure, he was liberated, but under the condition of a 20-year ban on filmmaking. Still, that didn’t stop him. In fact, his artistic resistance became even more personal, and this marks the third phase of his career.

This Is Not a Film (2011) is a documentary Panahi shot while under house arrest awaiting sentencing. It also marks a clear stylistic shift. Though not the first time we see Panahi in front of the camera (he appears meta-directorially in his second film), it is the first time we see him carrying the pain and themes of his films as his own person. Here, his personal struggle to keep making art when everything around him is collapsing takes center stage, offering profound reflections. He intercuts his confined reality with scenes from his destroyed film, at one point asking, “If we could tell a film, then why make a film?”

This Is Not a Film (2011)

Closed Curtain (2013) again features a deeply introspective Panahi, perhaps to a fault. The film includes one of his signature mid-story twists, and though the second half never matches the tension of the first, it becomes his most self-reflective work, where art is not just a privilege but a duty, an unending labour. 

After the direct, aggressive and personal anger of these two films, Panahi continued blending reality with the stories he wanted to tell, but now in a different way, more metaphorical, more observational, more a passive subject than the active protagonist of his own art. Taxi (2015), 3 Faces (2018), and No Bears (2022) present a Panahi still deeply interested in showcasing Iran’s diversity and inequalities, critiquing discrimination and attacks on citizens’ rights, but now with greater maturity.

Taxi (2015)

Taxi is a masterclass in minimalist filmmaking, with Panahi playing a taxi driver who ferries all kinds of people through Tehran – progressives, conservatives, the innocent, and the experienced. The people he films (no professional actors!) are authentic, real, and fit perfectly into his documentary-like style. Amidst it all, he finds time to orchestrate a love letter to cinema, revealing his cinephile side and his faith in art yet to be made. As the taxi driver, he doesn’t voice his ideas directly, though they can easily be interpreted via his ultra-meta script. In his next two films, he returns to playing himself, filmmaker and actor, living his own story.

In 3 Faces, Panahi revisits the struggles of Iranian women but doesn’t forget the role of art and each individual’s duty to fight for change. The film merges the defense of artists with the role that women have played in that fight by using art as a tool of resistance. Though not shared with many people – many prefer other works – this is the film I admire the most, for Panahi’s ability to be present without intruding, knowing when to step back and assume a secondary role, whether observing women (a powerful scene shows they party inside a house, and we, like him, watch from a distance – because that space is their safe space) or depicting a timeless Iranian village (highlight: a brilliant yet tragicomic scene involving a certain male tradition).

3 Faces (2018)

Much of what 3 Faces explores is replicated in No Bears, particularly in the way some village traditions perpetuate inequalities and discrimination against women. The film delves into the power of superstition and its effects on the human mind, more directly advocating harmful rituals through his on-screen persona. As Panahi works remotely on a film he is directing, he reflects on the filmmaker’s role: can he really change anything? Wouldn’t it be easier just to cross the border and leave it all behind? The final scene answers: No. Jafar Panahi is not ready to stop fighting.

Exploring Panahi’s career was an exercise I embraced wholeheartedly, and one that took me on more than just a cinematic journey. I felt I traveled through his world, watching him grow and change over time, but just like in his film The Circle, no matter how much he evolves, his convictions, critiques, and relentless pursuit of something better remain unchanged. I eagerly await It Was Just an Accident – his first film since 2006 without him onscreen – confident that even as Panahi changes, he will never cease to be Panahi. For the sake of cinema. For the sake of art. For the sake of culture. For the sake of resistance. For the sake of us all.

-Pedro