How Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi keeps reinventing against the state’s repression

In the rare public appearance, Panahi, who has lived away from Iran for two-and-a-half-years intermittently since early 2023, following his release from prison, addressed the sentence directly, outlining his defiant position: “Although I was given the opportunity, even in the hardest years, I never considered leaving my country and being a refugee elsewhere,” he said. He added that despite France selecting his new film as its Oscar entry, and despite the travel ban that forms part of his new penalty, Iran remains central to both his life and work. “One’s country is the best place to live, no matter what problems, what difficulties… My country is where I can breathe, where I can find the reason to live and where I can find the strength to create.”

‘Will go back to Iran’

Panahi’s comments came just days after his attorney, Mostafa Nili, confirmed that Panahi had been sentenced to one year in prison for “propaganda activities” against the Islamic Republic, alongside a two-year travel ban and a prohibition from joining any political or social organisations. The legal team plans to appeal, though the filmmaker’s own stance is more resolute. “This sentence happened in the middle of this [Oscar] process,” he told the audience. “But I will finish this campaign and go back to Iran as soon as possible after.” Panahi, who made his first feature 30 years ago, has continued making films despite repeated bans, arrests, and the spectre of surveillance. It’s tragic that while Iranian cinema continues to travel the world, its filmmakers like Mohammad Rasoulof, Mostafa Aleahmad and Saeed Roustaee continue to face political prosecutions.

Also read: Why Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof has been sentenced to 8 years in prison

It Was Just an Accident is a tense moral thriller about justice, memory and how the needle of suspicion continues to hover over people under authoritarian rule. The story revolves around Vahid, played by Vahid Mobasseri, a former political prisoner who, after encountering a man whose prosthetic leg’s creak triggers a painful recognition, becomes convinced the man might be his old torturer from prison. Vahid — unsure, haunted by doubt, and driven by trauma — abducts the suspect, whom the film calls Eghbal (portrayed by Ebrahim Azizi), and assembles a small group of fellow ex-prisoners and victims, each scarred differently by past oppression. As the group drives through deserted roads and under-lit backstreets to test Eghbal’s identity, the film becomes a meditation on how trauma, vengeance and hope collide when institutional justice seems unreachable.

Born in Mianeh in 1960, Panahi grew up far from Tehran and, in many ways, far from the world his films would one day portray. His early passion for cinema led him into short documentaries for Iranian television and ultimately to work as an assistant to Abbas Kiarostami. His first feature film as director, The White Balloon (1995), is a gentle tale of a young girl’s innocent quest to buy a goldfish. But its sharp observational framing, its open sense of public space, and its refusal to sentimentalise childhood showed Panahi’s interest in how rules — spoken and unspoken — govern lives. The film won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, becoming the first Iranian film to get a major Cannes award.

Similarly, his follow-up, The Mirror (1997) begins as a simple story about a first-grader named Bahareh (played by Mina Mohammad-Khani) waiting outside her school for a mother who never arrives, forcing her to navigate Tehran streets on her own with the uncertain help of strangers. But the film abruptly transforms when an off-camera voice instructs the young actor not to look into the lens; breaking the fourth wall, Mina removes her cast and scarf, and declares she no longer wants to act, stepping off the bus and effectively hijacking the narrative. What had been a neorealist tale of a lost child becomes a cinéma-vérité pursuit of Mina herself, who, now playing no one but herself, resists the crew’s attempts to put her back into fiction and instead charts her own route home.

‘Another kind of prison’

The Circle (2000), set over a single day and night in Tehran, weaves together a series of loosely connected stories of several women whose lives conceal a common thread of constraint and fear. There is no central protagonist; we follow women like a new mother whose daughter has just given birth to a girl and fears social consequences, former convicts recently released and scrambling to escape police scrutiny, a woman seeking an abortion after prison, and another who abandons her child under desperation. Through handheld-camera shots, abrupt transitions between characters, minimal exposition and scenes drawn from real urban spaces, the film immerses us in their precarious reality: the inability to travel alone, the risk of arrest for something as innocuous as buying a bus ticket or smoking, and the social and legal pressures on women’s bodies, choices, and mobility.

Also read: How Iranian cinema has captured its changing society through the decades

Crimson Gold (2003) and Offside (2006) continue this trajectory. Both films operate in the liminal spaces of Iranian society — doorways to places people are prevented from entering, encounters that reveal class anxiety, aspiration, humiliation. In Offside, women attempt to enter a stadium to watch a World Cup qualifying match. What could have been treated as a quirky misadventure becomes instead a portrait of absurd regulation and the strange intimacy created by enforcement. Everything after 2010 belongs to a different era; this was the year when Panahi was formally banned from filmmaking, arrested, and sentenced to house arrest. But this period has produced some of the most inventive cinematic thinking in the 21st century.

This Is Not a Film (2011), for instance, was recorded partly on an iPhone and smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive. Its rawness is the logical result of a filmmaker, denied his individual liberty, and left with only the question: what counts as cinema? The film’s energy comes from the tension between speech and silence, from the fact that documenting one’s inability to work becomes a form of work. In Closed Curtain (2013) and Taxi (2015), form and restriction become inseparable. If Panahi cannot enter public space without risk, then the taxi becomes his studio; if he cannot film fiction openly, then he blurs fiction and documentary until such distinctions disappear. 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022) further refine his language of meta-cinema. In the days since the sentencing, many have returned to a line by Panahi about why he continues to make films despite restrictions: “Because not making them would be another kind of prison.”