Jafar Panahi is Iran's most important director - he was sentenced to prison after this interview

Interview with Iranian director, Jafar Panahi
Interviewed by: Adam White / The Independent

Jafar Panahi wants to go home. “To be honest, my time is being wasted with all this traveling,” the director told me from a New York hotel room, in the middle of a months-long international press tour. “I can’t wait for this to be over, to go back to Iran, to sit down and start working.” A professional troublemaker and political dissident — both despised and feared by the Iranian authorities — Panahi smiles wryly. “I want to propose a legal solution to move on,” he says with a hint of irony. “All directors should be banned from leaving their countries so they can actually do some work.”

On Thursday afternoon, when we spoke, that comment made me laugh. On Monday evening — when I heard the news that Panahi had been sentenced to prison again by his own government — it made me cringe. But if there is anyone better equipped to deal with physical and existential threats, it is the man who has defied authoritarian rule for 25 years — surviving a 20-year travel ban, enduring two previous stints in prison, and a ban on making films.

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Speaking optimistically, in a voice scratched and worn out by cigarettes, Panahi is an enemy of the state in the style of Fred Hampton or Jane Fonda. He is bold. Unwavering. Almost frightening in his calm. His films - among them the sensitive 1995 drama, White balloon, as well as this year's Palme d'Or-winning film at Cannes, It was just an accident. in theaters this week - are sensitive portrayals of contemporary Iran. They often allude to, but are not necessarily fueled by, themes of state oppression, misogyny, and police brutality, and have been widely enjoyed around the world: It was just an accident. is expected to receive attention for Oscar next year, while Panahi was busy receiving three awards on Monday Gotham in New York - for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film - when he learned of his new sentence. Many of his films are also, according to Iran's rulers, "propaganda against the government" and are under constant attack.

Panahi’s last nine films have been banned in the country and, despite international awards (he has won top prizes at the Berlin and Venice festivals), he has faced repeated censorship: in 2010 he was sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the state” and was released after three months. In 2022 he spent another seven months for apparent involvement in anti-government protests, and was released only after going on a 48-hour hunger strike. His latest surprise sentence, which includes a year in prison and a two-year ban on leaving Iran, was the result of undisclosed “propaganda” activities, his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, announced on Monday. They added that they will appeal, but Panahi will also return to Iran, despite the threat against him. Escaping is not the 65-year-old’s style.

There were previous opportunities to flee, he explains. The 20-year travel ban ended prematurely in 2023, after 14 years, and Panahi and his wife left Iran for Paris, where he edited the film. It was just an accident.. “But I’m not able to fit in anywhere else,” he says, speaking through translator Iante Roach. “The problem lies within me. I can only live in Iran. I don’t have a deep understanding of people in other countries – say, England, or France. And if I were to make a film about them, it would only be superficial.”

Panahi was officially banned from making films in 2010, and for a moment he considered accepting his fate. “I was deeply shaken psychologically,” he recalls. But the punishment also coincided with his newfound status as an inspiration to younger or aspiring directors. He found himself being approached by people asking how they could – like him – make interesting and hostile work under difficult conditions. Many of them have since given up. “I asked myself what I should do,” Panahi says. “Should I become one of these people who sit around and complain about how difficult things have become? Or should I try to find a way? In the end, I decided to do whatever it took to keep working.”

What he did was cleverly bend the rules of his own punishment. First, he made a documentary about his circumstances and called it This is not a movie.. “And then I asked myself what else I could do,” he says. “I thought, well, I can drive - so I can be a taxi driver, but if I become a taxi driver then I can put a camera in the taxi and the passengers will tell me their stories.” So that’s how his 2015 film, Taksi. Another film, a pseudo-documentary called Without bears, was done in strict secrecy in 2021.

“The best films being made in Iran today are made illegally,” he says. “And people find their own ways to make them — many of them get state-approved permits to make a certain film, but then they do it differently or add a derogatory message to it.” He has no qualms about the more commercial films that are allowed by Iran’s rulers. “I just ask that the state tolerate my films enough to allow them to be shown,” he adds. Only the white balloon and its 1997 sequel, mirror, have appeared legally in the country.

I ask Panahi if, at times, he gets any thrill out of the fact that he manages to make a successful film under the radar; whatever the context that surrounds him, is there ever any fun? He smiles. “You know, we’re doing a serious interview, but we’re also laughing a lot at the same time,” he says. “That’s life. If you take the laughter out of life, everything becomes artificial, and it becomes very difficult.” I take that as a “yes.”

It was just an accident., perhaps Panahi's most directly political film to date. It centers on Vahid (played by Vahid Mobasseri), a former political prisoner now working as a mechanic who is convinced that he has encountered the man who interrogated him, violently, years earlier. He bases this belief solely on his own voice and the distinctive creaking of his prosthetic leg, though he is aware that he may be wrong. Vahid kidnaps her anyway and then enlists the help of his other dissident friends to decide what to do with her. It is a tense and often shocking film - never didactic, despite the circumstantial discussions of violence and revenge - and builds to a dramatic climax shot in a single long take.

Panahi’s own experiences in prison shaped the film’s story. “Prisoners have a common experience, and that is interrogation,” he says. “They force us to sit in a chair facing a wall, without our lawyer present, and with an interrogator asking us questions from behind. What happens to the prisoners is that, instead of thinking about the questions and answering them, they get completely involved in trying to guess and determine who this interrogator is. What does he look like? How old is he? And if I see the owner of this voice outside the prison, will I recognize him?”

Panahi, as far as he knows, has never encountered his investigators in real life, and he’s not sure how he would react if he did. But he doesn’t want audiences to necessarily get bogged down in the specific details of the film’s subject; instead, he wants them to ask broader questions after watching it. “I really want people to confront [the idea of] the cycle of violence,” he says. “Should the revenge be allowed to continue, or should it end at some point?”

I ask Panahi about the people who appear in his films, who are usually a mix of actors and non-actors. Like him, they are aware that they are engaging in work that could easily put a target on them. Does he warn them of the dangers? He shrugs. “They know very well who they are being asked to work with, and they are also all eager to do something different,” he says.

He mentions the movement Women, Life, Freedom which began in 2022 and saw Iranian citizens take to the streets to protest government oppression and corruption - sparked by an incident where a woman was arrested by the country's morality police for not wearing a hijab properly.

“Since then, many of us in Iran have decided to do something about this movement, in whatever form,” he says. For Panahi and those who participate in his films, this is achieved through art. “We are all more concerned with creating a good work than with the consequences it might bring.”

As this week has shown, the consequences have come back to haunt Panahi. But he won’t — and admits he can’t — work or think any other way. He tells me about the time he made a 30-minute psychological thriller in film school that was largely a rip-off of the style and visual language of Alfred Hitchcock — one of his earliest inspirations.

“It looked nice, but it had no soul,” he recalls. So, in perhaps his first real act of defiance, he snuck into the school’s film lab at night and stole the film negatives. “And then I destroyed them so no one would ever see my film,” he laughs. “Of course, at the time no one knew who I was. I was just one of many film students trying to find themselves. However, I realized that your signature has value, and that you can’t just put it on any film. I knew what it meant to put your mark on something.” /Telegraph/