Master of artistic coups: Panahi's Palme d'Or divides Cannes, Iran

In their response to Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or for It was Just an Accident, one thing united commentators at Cannes and state-affiliated media in Iran. Both called it a “political” win, albeit for different reasons. Global media said the prize was a sign the French film festival was faltering on its traditionally “apolitical” stance to engage with international affairs, while Iranian government-backed outlets — under scrutiny for brutally suppressing protests since 2022 — dubbed it a West-sanctioned smear campaign.

  A simple examination of Panahi’s oeuvre, however, shows his lens belongs only to himself. The 64-year-old is a master of artistic coups. He routinely subverts government restrictions to arrive at unique ways of seeing, which are not influenced by the European gaze either — This is not a Film and Taxi Tehran, for instance. His films cannot be shown within his country, and are riskily smuggled into overseas festivals. But despite this recognition, the battle-hardened filmmaker is not smitten with the West, declaring he was “bored there”, both personally and professionally. 

  Producing films under the constraints of censorship has kept him on his toes. He shoots in secret to avoid government permission. This earned him stints in prison and long bans on making films and travelling abroad, which were lifted only in 2023. A festival-circuit joke had it that all his recent films were about not being allowed to make films. This is partly true, though not a new development. Every director essentially makes one movie in his lifetime — Abbas Kiarostami (Panahi’s cinematic parent) certainly thought so — and Panahi has pondered one question ever since his 1995 debut White Balloon.

  He is singularly interested in the absurdity of restrictions placed on people by family, society, and government — and the natural desire to break free. A product of the Kanoon school of filmmaking, emerging from Iran’s Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents, he started making neorealist children’s films. Since filmmakers could not truthfully depict the domestic lives of adults (rules of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance dictate that women wear headscarves even in scenes at home), the world of children was a suitable substitute.

  In 1997’s Ayneh, he continued filming even after the child protagonist Mina, tired of make-believe, looked at the camera and protested, “I’m not acting anymore!” The resulting blend of fiction and documentary is a striking allegory for women seeking agency. White Balloon too featured young lead characters determined to get their way, often going against what they are told to do. His narratives, more confrontational than the more poetic Kiarostami, shifted to include adult rebellions, but always outside the home.

  Dayereh, the first bold step in that direction, was welcomed with a Golden Lion at Venice and punished with a ban in Iran. The women in the film may have managed to escape prison but meet a series of impediments outside too — they often crave a cigarette yet are always discouraged from lighting one, a telling trope for their powerlessness. Where Crimson Gold drew its drama from the boundaries of class, Offside imagined teen girls defying the exclusion of women from football stadiums. The worst of his problems then had been the indefinite wait for permissions, but after showing solidarity with 2009’s Green Movement in Iran, a period of house arrest followed. 

This opened up a phase of clandestine filmmaking, starting with This is not a Film, where he technically only discusses a film he wanted to make. Iranian filmmakers are active innovators in the road movie genre, and Panahi advanced the car movie format (car-nameh, if you will) with Taxi Tehran and 3 Faces. Apart from the practical function of letting the director work undetected, the car is analogous to the sense of confinement and movement felt by people at large. 

Oppressive rules are a universally occurring absurdity, as Panahi’s travel experiences establish. As an Iranian artist, he spoke out when he struggled to secure a visa to enter Hong Kong in 2001 and was detained by US Customs the same year. While global media tend to represent Iran through a binary view of evil establishment versus suffering masses, Panahi lets us glimpse ordinary Iranians in a nuanced milieu. His body of work always was and remains about women, life, and freedom.