This Is Not A Film

Don’t be fooled by that title: this is a film, and an extreme­ly good one at that. It’s intend­ed as a satir­i­cal barb aimed at the oppres­sive Iran­ian author­i­ties who banned laud­ed native direc­tor Jafar Panahi from film­mak­ing for 20 years, believ­ing his work to be a major desta­bil­is­ing threat to the cur­rent polit­i­cal régime.

Cre­ative­ly bound and gagged, Panahi still man­aged to have his film smug­gled out of Iran inside a birth­day cake so it could receive its world pre­mière at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

As those famil­iar with his work will know, Panahi is not a film­mak­er to hold his tongue when it comes to high­light­ing the injus­tices rife with­in Iran­ian soci­ety. Just look at his two seething stud­ies of ingrained patri­ar­chal tra­di­tion in 2000’s The Cir­cle and 2006’s Offside.

Yet This is Not a Film, a mean­der­ing, Kafkaesque self-por­trait made with smart­phones and a friend’s cam­era, is all the more affect­ing for its com­posed and even mor­dant­ly humor­ous tone. Panahi has not opt­ed to heap scorn on his mis­guid­ed gov­ern­ment, but to demon­strate that his per­son­al cre­ativ­i­ty remains unbri­dled and no num­ber of bans, sanc­tions or threats can pre­vent a deter­mined artist from indulging his or her passions.

Panahi’s ini­tial con­ceit is to evoke the film he want­ed to make pri­or to his ban kick­ing in. Using mask­ing tape and pil­lows, he cre­ates the out­line of a room on the floor of his apart­ment and pro­ceeds to explain and enact – in minute detail – how the open­ing scenes were intend­ed to play out.

Every con­ceiv­able angle is cov­ered, from what the direc­tor was look­ing for when loca­tion scout­ing, to the way he intend­ed a cam­era to glide in through a win­dow. Even from this crude depic­tion, we get a jolt­ing sense of both the dra­ma with­in the film and Panahi’s intu­itive feel for storytelling.

Panahi doesn’t divulge the entire tale – he knows when he’s made his point. He asks: could this lit­tle demon­stra­tion be called a film? Is he break­ing the law by lark­ing around with­in the con­fines of his own house? The thought infu­ri­ates him. Lat­er, a stu­dent from his apart­ment block knocks at the door and offers to emp­ty the bins.

Panahi choos­es to join him in the ele­va­tor, ask­ing him some ques­tions on cam­era con­cern­ing his feel­ings about fam­i­ly, edu­ca­tion and life in gen­er­al. Each response is, in its way, a small, enclosed nar­ra­tive. That each one is also being record­ed would sug­gest, again, that Panahi is flout­ing his ban.

This is Not a Film is protest cin­e­ma that fights a war of attri­tion, mak­ing its point with a suc­ces­sion of ratio­nal, well-explained argu­ments instead of dish­ing out hys­ter­i­cal cheap-shots and bloat­ed sta­tis­tics. But as con­cep­tu­al­ly tricky as it all sounds, the film’s most elo­quent moment is a sub­tle visu­al metaphor, as Panahi sor­row­ful­ly gazes out from his doorstep and is over­whelmed by the blaz­ing bon­fires and boom­ing fire­works from the Per­sian New Year celebrations.