Jafar Panahi Will Not Be Silenced

Jafar Panahi was arrested in 2009 on the suspicion of making a film critical of the regime in Iran. He was not allowed to travel, to give interviews, to make films. He was in prison. He went on hunger strike. Finally, the sentence came down, and it was devastating: A 20-year ban on making films. People made impassioned speeches about him from the international stages of the Berlinale and the Cannes Film Festival. I hosted an Iranian Film Blog-a-thon on my site, just as a way to show solidarity and to (in my own small way) deny the Iranian regime the privacy with which they wished to operate. Jafar Panahi is official Iran’s worst nightmare: a local artist, critical of the conditions in Iran, especially the position of women (which he lampoons in Offside, a great film, and shows with a documentary-like realism and brutality in The Circle), who makes films that have a passionate international following, people in Evil America who sit around waiting for “the next Panahi.” The regime HATES that. It’s awesome. Keep hating, haters. You’re not the boss of me. Persecuted and hounded for years, they finally “got” Panahi, and it was a devastating time for those of us who love Panahi’s films.

But since then … we have had two extraordinary films from him (one smuggled out of Iran inside a pastry to make its premiere at Cannes). People who collaborate with him are also arrested, their passports revoked. And yet the stakes are so high, and Panahi is so beloved, that people are willing to take those risks. The mere FACT of the EXISTENCE of these films is an extraordinary testament to not only Panahi but any oppressed artist anywhere.

The films he has made since the official ban came down have been This Is Not a Film (my review here) and Closed Curtain (my review here, a film which was on my individual Top Ten for 2014.) After Closed Curtain, I found myself thinking, despairingly, “Where can he go from here? Is he saying goodbye?” The title alone seemed to suggest his state of mind.

He is not supposed to be doing ANY of this, remember. He is supposed to have vanished. He is supposed to accept silence (as his heartbreaking letter smuggled somehow to Isabella Rossellini, read from the stage of the Berlinale attests).

And yet: he has not accepted the ban on his career. Officially, in Iran, he has been silenced. Unofficially, and illegally, he has continued to make films. He is a hero. Not to just us “out here” but to his fellow Iranians. Because of the Internet and bootleg DVDs, his films are seen by everyone there. A total crackdown is impossible in this day and age, and it’s a beautiful and precarious thing.

Jafar Panahi has a new film coming out. !!

It is called Taxi and it will be premiering at the Berlinale, a film festival with which Panahi has a warm and affectionate relationship. He will not be allowed to travel there, of course.

But another film exists. Panahi has been making another movie.

Vaclav Havel, when asked how he had survived under Communism for so long (with constant arrests and persecution and imprisonment, when his plays were famous around the world but virtually unproduced in his own country, all of his works banned), would say that he lived “as if” he were free. Spoken like a man of the theatre, reminiscent of the concept of Stanislavsky’s “magic What If.” To an actor, the question “What if” is akin to a magic spell, like it is for a child. The “what if” becomes as real as the reality before you. And so Vaclav Havel, in the face of enormous oppression, made the choice to live AS IF he were free.

Jafar Panahi is doing the same thing. He is not free, but he is living AS IF he were.

My heart is so full of emotion right now.

I can’t wait to see it.