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Watch: Two Scenes from Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, the Iranian Director’s Third Feature Made During a 20-Year Ban
“Either you have to escape the country or start hoping to go back to jail,” a woman sitting in the passenger seat tells Jafar Panahi in the first clip shared from the Iranian director’s latest feature Taxi. Driving a cab through Tehran and conversing with passengers, Panahi is again the star in his third feature since a 20-year-ban on filmmaking imposed by the Iranian government. In another clip, a young girl reels off a checklist of guidelines necessary to make a distributable film in Iran (headscarves on women, no relations between the genders). The winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear, Taxi (reviewed favorably by our correspondent Giovanni Marchini Camia here) has yet to be picked up for American distribution. During a rare recent interview with a semi-official Iranian news agency, Panahi asked that his work be shown at home. “The people in power accuse us of making films for foreign festivals,” he said. “They hide behind political walls and don’t say that our films are never authorized for screening in Iranian cinemas.” More on that from Variety here.
