"Even shrunk down on a tiny Zoom display, it is difficult not to be slightly in awe of Jafar Panahi. Probably the world's most famous dissident filmmaker, he is also one of Iran's most prolific - this despite a 20-year filmmaking ban, during which he has made six feature films in secret. One of them, 2011's meta-documentary This Is Not a Film, was smuggled out of Iran on a USB concealed inside a birthday cake."
"Filmmaking for him is decidedly not a vanity project; he talks about it instead as a kind of vocation, a deep impulse that he has to satisfy, and a human right that he insists upon asserting. "When I received the initial sentence that banned me from working, it was a huge, profound psychological shock," he says. "I kept thinking, if I can't work then what can I do?""
Jafar Panahi makes films clandestinely despite a 20-year ban and repeated arrests, including recent charges of 'propaganda against the state'. He has produced six features in secret, notably smuggling This Is Not a Film out on a USB hidden in a birthday cake. His Palme d'Or-winning It Was Just an Accident revisits his arrest and explores political prisoners confronting their torturer. Panahi rejects labels of bravery and frames filmmaking as a vocation, an essential impulse and human right. Facing psychological shock from the ban, he retreated underground and adopted meta-cinematic strategies, often appearing on camera to interrogate the act of artmaking.
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