"This is Not a Film"

[speaking in foreign language]

[Richard] I'm Richard Brody, and this clip is

from the film ironically titled This Is Not a Film,

a 2011 work by the Iranian director Jafar Panahi.

In 2010, Panahi, a critic of the Iranian regime,

was arrested, sentenced to six years in prison,

and banned for 20 years from making films,

traveling abroad, and granting interviews.

[speaking in foreign language]

Under house arrest while appealing his sentence,

he documented his situation on video.

He avoided the additional charge of defying the ban

by not operating the camera himself.

[speaking in foreign language]

He had his son leave a video camera running in the morning,

and had his friend, the documentary filmmaker

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who is also credited as co-director,

come by and film Panahi with his own camera.

[speaking in foreign language]

[laughing]

[speaking in foreign language]

At the time of his arrest,

Panahi was about to start shooting another film.

Unable to make it, he decided

to act it out for Mirtahmasb's camera.

[speaking in foreign language]

Deprived of his locations, deprived of his actors,

Panahi becomes a master symbolist.

The movie that he planned to make,

based on a story by Chekhov,

is about a girl locked in a house by her parents,

on religious grounds,

in order to prevent her from attending art school.

In the process, Panahi delivers something

of an analytical anthology of the cinema.

[speaking in foreign language]

Frustrated by the ersatz movie he was resigned to making,

he studied certain key moments from his own films,

in order to figure out what, in fact,

it means to make a movie.

And his answer is based in experience.

[speaking in foreign language]

He shows that nothing in his planning,

nothing in his script could ever have brought the surprises

that actors on location generate.

[speaking in foreign language]

And that, for him, is the essence of a movie,

not an idea, but a chunk of reality, fortuitously preserved.

[speaking in foreign language]

Panahi films, or rather, doesn't film himself

in the course of his daily life,

as he tinkers around at home

and feeds the family iguana, Iggy.

[speaking in foreign language]

[explosions booming]

It's significant that the movie takes place

at the time of the New Year's celebration.

One of the traditional elements

of the festivities is fireworks.

Hearing them from his window,

Panahi reacts as if they weren't festive, but violent.

And in fact, the revelation of the religious order's

opposition to those fireworks suggests

a serious conflict at hand.

[fireworks exploding]

[speaking in foreign language]

The movie was shown at the 2011 Cannes Festival,

after having been smuggled out of Iran,

on a flash drive hidden in a birthday cake.

[speaking in foreign language]

And since he himself was banned from making movies,

he also began to wonder what does it mean

to be a maker of a movie.

In this scene, he offers a theory.

The logic is clear, the author of this film,

This Is Not a Film, is not Jafar Panahi,

it's the Iranian government,

that has brought about the realities on display here.

[speaking in foreign language]