SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL - Persecution is complex - IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2025) + THE SECRET AGENT (Kleber Mendonca Filho, Brazil, 2025)

These two films were among a number of blockbuster successes at the Sydney Film Festival. One measure of such success occurs when the Dress Circle is opened up and filled with a thousand bodies, many of them in the rear seats peering at a screen the size of a postage stamp from seats installed when the nation was a whole lot thinner than it is now. That happened with both.

Some 150 programs, a third of the 448 on offer, sold out  and the SFF management reported it's attendance was up by 11% to more than 150,000 admissions, claimed by CEO Frances Wallace as  "the highest selling edition in its 72-year history. The 150,000 attendees represented a 11% increase on 2024."  Though what to make of the claim previously made in  2019 that that  "event was the most highly attended Sydney Film Festival to date: attendances at screenings, events and talks were up by 10.5% in 2019 to 188,000." Maybe it's a BC (Before Covid)/AC reset.

Both films came to the festival accompanied by their directors, fresh from award-laden appearances at Cannes where Jafar Panahi's film It Was Just An Accident won the Palme d'Or and Kleber Mendonca Filho won the Best Director Award and the FIPRESCI Prize awarded by a Jury presided over by our own CJ Johnson. 

Panahi's film, as with everything he makes, shows no fear. It's story of a victim of official state torture accidentally coming across the man who may or may not have been his torturer is an an astonishing blend of comedy and up to the minute politics via a series of increasingly absurd twists of circumstance. And you get the sense of underlying, seemingly casually displayed, bravery by not only Panahi but also his actors and technicians in making a film which lays out the oppressiveness of the regime and the dangers its citizens still face each day.

Wagner Moura, opening sequence of The Secret Agent

Cant say the same about The Secret Agent which sets itself back in 1977 when Brazil was a fascist police state. The film takes over  two and a half hours chiefly to tell the story of one dissident among a broad canvas of the fearful, the disgruntled and the lumbering police state and its assassins. It may be that there are still lessons and warnings for Brazilians, indeed for all of us in an age of Trump, ICE, El Salvador concentration camps, mass deportations, arrests of political opponents and, even closer to home, whistleblowers being jailed and police forces everywhere being given ever greater resources, one of the few election promises made routinely and one of the few honoured to the letter. 

I digress...The Secret Agent is a safer story and the director is never likely to go to jail for telling it at such length and with such languour, a trope demonstrated from the very start in a slow boil opening sequence involving a VW beetle pulling in for petrol, a dead body lying in the sun and a stray police car whose inhabitants, rather than investigating the body threaten and try to shakedown the VW driver. All that takes over 18 minutes and finally the film gets going...

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 

Sydney Film Festival - Rod Bishop recommends THE YEAR OF THE EVERLASTING STORM (Jafar Panahi, Anthony Chen, Malik Vitthal, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, David Lowrey, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, USA, 2021)

The better Covid-19 films to have come our way include scriptwriter Jack Thorne’s care-home drama Help (with Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham) and the two documentaries: In the Same Breath(Nanfu Wang) and Totally Under Control (Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyun and Suzanne Hillinger).

The Year of the Everlasting Storm is an art-house contribution and its seven short films make for an enthralling couple of hours.

The opener is set in Tehran, in the apartment belonging to Jafar Panahi, the Iranian film director who was placed under house arrest in 2010. It opens with his huge pet iguana, Iggy, lusting after some pigeon eggs beyond the lizard’s reach on an outside balcony. When the intercom rings, Panahi and his wife Tahereh think it’s probably someone from the Covid Unit, but it’s his 90-year-old mother in full PPE, strolling in and spraying everything in sight with an antiseptic wipe (like a real-life South Park skit).

The family use mobile phone video to connect with their daughter in Paris while Iggy prowls the corridors, sometimes retreating into his safe haven under a cupboard and then finally watching - while being stroked and sung to by Panahi’s mother - as a hatchling emerges from one of the eggs. There’s a lightness of touch to Panahi’s short despite the constant elliptical references to disease and death. Beautifully and lovingly made. 

A further three shorts from Wuhan, Santiago and California are also family-based and share similar reactions to lockdown isolation. Like Panahi’s film, they all show different ways of transcending the horrors of pandemic life. 

In her short, Laura Poitras, who made the Edward Snowden doco Citizenfour, uses an international group of activist journalists who are terrified by the Pegasus software being used on mobile phones to surveil private citizens. Many of them have been targets themselves and give examples of its use (including the killing of Jamal Khashoggi). Chillingly, they warn of the marketing of Pegasus software for Covid contact tracing.

The David Lowery and Apichatpong Weerasethakul contributions don’t directly reference Covid at all. Lowery weaves a tale of exhumation, the body of a New Orleans boy who seems to have died of a past pandemic disease, or maybe during Hurricane Katrina. His body was buried in Texas and is reclaimed at night by an unknown woman. 

Weerasethakul has us looking at white sheets teeming with insects that have been attracted to a bed by a host of overhanging florescent lights. A gecko clings to the underside of one light, the heat causing it to constantly move its legs, rather than give up access to all these delicious insects. 

The Thai auteur, always enigmatic, cinematic and speculatively interpretive, lets us gaze into an apparently chaotic test-tube of the natural world where the behaviour of even the smallest of insects is beyond the control or understanding of humans.

One screening remains of this film at the SFF on Sunday 14 November at 8.30 pm, Event Cinemas George Street.

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