Jafar Panahi – This Is Not a Film

I guess I’d better stop myself before I get overly passionate and personal, but it’s hard not to when I think back on the situation that Panahi is in. I am passionate about writing, and just the mere thought of being prohibited to because I want to write the truth… the mere idea makes my stomach roll.

I saw a man that really is passionate about his career, a man that simply wants to make movies. Yet, he is a man that respects the orders of his government, no matter how unjust. For 75 minutes we see Panahi make calls to his lawyer, order food, discuss issues with his camera-man, talk to his neighbors, feed his daughter’s iguana. He is prohibited from making movies, writing scripts, but the sentence said nothing about reading scripts.

Panahi goes on to try and explain what he wanted to do with the movie he was planning on making. He starts to read the script out loud as he marks the layout of the set. The movie is about a young girl that wants to go to college, but whose family refuses to let her do so. They lock her in the house to prohibit her from the registering. The irony.

In This Is Not a Film, many issues are brought up. The most important one is, of course, the political one. How much power can governments have when it comes to the power of speech… or when it comes to artistic freedom? Then there are the artistic issues: what defines a movie, what drives people to make movies — because it’s quite obvious that Panahi has suffered much during his career, seeing as he has been prohibited from making the movies he wants to — how far one is ready to go for the right to create art. There are also emotional issues: stress, love, despair, bitterness.

One would think that to watch a man do nothing for 75 minutes would be extremely boring, yet Panahi manages to amuse at the same time that he makes us think. This little not-a-movie was transferred into a USB that was then baked into a cookie and mailed to Cannes. A huge effort seeing as This Is Not a Film will probably worsen Panahi’s situation with the Iranian government. Yet, he did it because he loves to make movies and he would love to keep on doing so.

If this were a review, I would give this little movie/non-movie five stars. But this is not a review and Panahi did not make a movie.