Jafar Panahi's Taxi (2015)

Panahi's sensitive exploration of quotidian Teheran, with the state never far behind

Country: Iran

Director: Jafar Panahi

Time: 1 hour and 21 minutes

What Does It Elicit: Everyday Teheran, he did that with an iPhone?, and meta-musings on filmmaking

Where Can I Get It: Amazon (to rent), MUBI (free w/subscription), YouTube (to rent),

Iran has some incredible filmmakers operating under difficult conditions and various degrees of censorship.  Lost amidst geopolitical rumblings tends to be the incredible quality of the country’s cinema and the rich formal inventiveness and creativity evinced by directors as diverse as Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up), Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar), and Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), alongside diaspora filmmakers like Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night).  At the same time, Iranian film directors are like all film directors.  They have their own ticks, interests, and unique views on the folly of the human condition.  Enter Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, a soft-spoken but bold critique of the strictures placed on filmmaking in Iran, channeled through a sensitive and bemused look at quotidian life in the country’s capital.

In 2010, Panahi was arrested and banned from making new films—which led, as you might expect, to his smuggling out of the country 76 minutes of iPhone video footage documenting his house arrest and releasing it as a work entitled, This Is Not A Film (2011).  Throughout his career, he has been an astute observer of the everyday.  A master of pacing, he allows quotidian scenes to unravel slowly, letting meaning affix itself to interactions and conversations.  At the same time, he’s been immensely innovative in terms of expanding notions of what constitutes film, evincing a certain Duchamp-ian bemusement in the face of the absurd, while constantly asking us to think about the line between documentary and fiction in novel and thrilling ways.

Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:

Asghar Farhadi — About Elly (2011)

Jafar Panahi  — The White Balloon (1995)