At the Sydney Film Festival - Tom Ryan considers the films of Palme d'Or winner Jafar Panahi and his retrospective at the SFF - THE SPIRIT OF REBELLION & THE NOT-FILMS

Jafar Panahi

Editor's Note: After this post was published, Jafar Panahi's film It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d'Or  at Cannes. The film also screens at the Sydney Film Festival. The final para of Tom's piece below has been edited to reflect this.

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The 2025 Sydney Film Festival has programmed a welcome retrospective of the work of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, an artist who has always gone his own way against overwhelming odds. 

 

Regular festival goers will need no introduction to the work of Jafar Panahi. Others might, for his films rarely make it on to local screens or streaming services. Which is why this year’s Sydney Film Festival’s honouring of his continuing career is an event worth celebrating. 

 

The White Balloon

In his quiet way, the 64-year-old Iranian writer-director-editor (and, relatively recently, actor) has long exuded the spirit of rebellion. Following his studies at Tehran’s College of Cinema and TV, his career began with a few short documentaries made for TV and work as an assistant director for Abbas Kiarostami (on 1994’s Through the Olive Trees). Then came two remarkable neorealist-inclined features about children, Panahi citing the Italian neorealist movement, and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief (1948) in particular (“It is the most important film of my life”) as key influences. 

In line with De Sica’s film, and with the inclination of a number of his contemporaries’ work, both The White Balloon (1995, co-written by Kiarostami) and The Mirror (1997) are essentially stories of the street. Filtering everyday events through the eyes of a child, Panahi adopts a story-telling strategy which immediately, and classically, sets his youthful protagonists’ innocence in contrast to a world of brutal experience. 

 

For Panahi and his colleagues, it was a way of slipping social critiques past the constraints imposed by their government’s oppressive censorship policies. As the affable filmmaker told me over a dinner shared with his Farsi interpreter during his visit to the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2006, it was a case of direction through indirection. “In Iran, it’s always been difficult to make films that deal with the real circumstances of adults. But you can create situations and put words into the mouths of children that speak indirectly about the problems of their elders.” 

 

Unspoken was the implication that such an approach allowed him to argue to the authorities that he didn’t mean it like that. And he didn‘t need to add that such a method is also irresistible to audiences. Who wouldn’t empathise with lost and homeless children fending for themselves in unforgiving surroundings? Who wouldn’t discover, in their struggle with oppressive circumstances and their ability to adapt to them, a metaphor for humankind’s experience of the world? Or of life in Iran? 

 

The White Balloon was greeted enthusiastically both inside his homeland and beyond its borders. After winning the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995, it even became Iran’s official entry at the Oscars for the Best Foreign Language Film in the following year. Soon afterwards, though, the country’s rulers had second thoughts. They tried to get the nomination withdrawn, and, when that move was unsuccessful, prohibited Panahi’s travel to the US and forbade him from doing interviews with the American press.

 

The Circle

The battle lines were now clearly marked and Panahi’s career has effectively become a cat-and-mouse game with his government that has continued to the present day. By 2000, his social commentaries were no longer camouflaged and his third feature, The Circle, directly and brilliantly examines the plight of women in contemporary Iran. Revising the merry-go-round structure of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play, La Ronde (inadvertently, for Panahi says he was unfamiliar with it), the film moves from incident to incident and character to character as his female protagonists cross paths in the street. Most of them don’t know each other, but they’re linked by the situations in which they find themselves. Each has recently been released from prison and the suggestion is that their confinement was the result of their having challenged the carefully regulated rules of an oppressively patriarchal society.

 

“It was so difficult making The Circle,” Panahi recalled. “They (the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance) just rejected it without any explanation. It was humiliating. Nobody would ever tell me anything. The reason I eventually got to make it was that the independent Iranian press got behind me. But it took me nine months to get permission to make the film and then it was officially banned in Iran.” That ban remains in place, a fate that has befallen much of his subsequent work and he has long been, at least as far as officialdom is concerned, a persona non grata in Iran.

 

Further humiliation followed, although its source lay elsewhere. After the San Francisco Film Festival invited him to accept its Freedom of Expression Prize for The Circle, he’d flown direct from Hong Kong and was in transit at JFK airport in New York when it was made clear to him that he wasn’t welcome. Given his ongoing criticisms of the oppressive Iranian regime, it was impossible to miss the irony of the situation. 

 

After refusing customs officials’ demand that he be fingerprinted, he was arrested. “I showed them my invitation, but they threatened to put me in jail. They refused to allow me an interpreter or a phone-call. Then they chained me together with other women and men from different countries like prisoners from medieval times and refused me entry. It was a nightmare.” He was denied entry to the US and ended up back in Hong Kong.

 

Offside

But the affront only succeeded in adding fuel to the heroically irrepressible filmmaker’s fire. The two films that followed were again direct in their critiques of Iranian society. The engrossing Crimson Gold (2003) deals with an impoverished pizza man, a jewellery heist gone wrong and the trials of class division in Iran. And the simple but compelling Offside (2006) is a story inspired by his daughter about a group of young girls who’ve been denied entry to a World Cup-qualifying match in Tehran and who conjure their own quiet revolution. 

 

Following this, Panahi struggled to get projects off the ground while making very public his disapproval of the ruling regime. After Iran’s 2009 presidential election, he was a vocal supporter of the so-called “Green Movement”, protesting the disputed result that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Then, on March 1, 2010, he was arrested on charges of colluding to commit crimes against the Islamic Republic, leading to headlines around the world. 

 

This Is Not A Film

He was sentenced to six years in prison (subsequently commuted to house arrest) and banned from filmmaking or travelling outside the country for 20 years. After which began his involvement in a series of not-films, beginning with This Is Not A Film (2011), a mischievous masterpiece of allusion ruminating about what a film might be and who might be deemed responsible for its creation. International audiences gained access after it was smuggled out of Iran in a USB stick hidden inside a birthday cake.

 

Soon afterwards, along similar lines, came the cleverly reflexive Closed Curtain (2013), choreographing an interaction between Panahi himself and two other characters – a writer and a young woman – who might or might not be figments of his imagination. It was followed by Taxi (2015), in which Panahi plays a Tehran taxi driver whose passengers ponder their circumstances and (via Panahi’s niece playing one of them) the state of filmmaking in Iran. 

 

Then came 3 Faces (2018), a road movie which finds Panahi literally and metaphorically behind the steering-wheel again in a situation that, like his earlier work, draws attention to the place of women in Iranian society. And No Bears (2022), set in a village near the Turkish border and dealing with a filmmaker (Panahi once more) trying to find a way of telling a story about a couple’s efforts to escape Iran. Something which he has persistently declined to do. 

 

It Was Just An Accident 

Panahi’s travel ban was finally lifted in 2023 and he was at Cannes this year with his latest work, It Was Just an Accident (2025), which has just won the Palme d’Or there and is also screening in competition at the SFF.  But during the years since his initial arrest almost 15 years ago, his not-films have effectively served as a report card to the world that he’s not only alive and well, but that the fire inside still burns bright. They’re also evidence that, even if the style of his filmmaking has changed, his career has continued along the same path he laid out for himself at the start. By way of drawing our evening in 2006 to a close, he declared, “I always wanted to make films that matter.” And he has.

 

A key highlight of this year’s Sydney Film Festival, the complete retrospective of Jafar Panahi’s features screens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from June 7 – 15