Jafar Panahi
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TIFF 2022: No Bears, La Pupille
I got out of a jam-packed P&I screening of Jafar Panahi’s No Bears literally two minutes after the Venice Film Festival announced a special jury prize for the film. It’s probably not overly cynical to attribute at least part of both my screening’s high attendance and the festival’s award to the sad news that the director is back in jail—his status as a high-profile Iranian dissident is inextricable from his work since 2011 when, under house arrest and banned from making movies, he started making features with him front and center as the lead protagonist. That on-screen character is by now […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 10, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Jafar Panahi’s No Bears
The first trailer has arrived for acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, which features the director starring as a version of himself. According to the official synopsis, the film follows “two parallel love stories in which the lovers struggle with hidden and unavoidable obstacles, the force of superstitions and the mechanics of power.” Along with the film’s new trailer, Celluloid Dreams has uploaded two snippets from the film to their YouTube channel: one scene that contextualizes the film’s title, and another that depicts the oft-paradoxical hurdles Panahi faces in continuing his cinematic practice. A politically defiant and visually vital filmmaker, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 18, 2022 -
Venice Film Festival Announces 2022 Lineup
The lineup for the 79th Venice Film Festival is now live, one day after Noah Baumbach‘s adaptation of Don Delillo’s novel White Noise was announced as the opening night film. The films announced today include Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, Joanna Hogg‘s The Eternal Daughter, recently jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi‘s No Bears, Frederick Wiseman‘s narrative turn A Couple and more. White Noise marks the first time that a Netflix film serves as the festival’s opening night film. The streamer is also present with Dominik’s Blonde, the Nicolas Winding Refn mini-series Copenhagen Cowboy and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo (or False […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 26, 2022 -
“For Us Iranians, the Car Has Become a Second Home”: Panah Panahi on His Debut Feature, Hit the Road
Hit the Road, the debut feature from writer/director Panah Panahi, is a 93-minute long goodbye of aptly sweet sorrow. Panah, 38, is the son of Jafar Panahi, one of the undisputed titans of Iranian art-house cinema. Having served as an assistant on his father’s films and edited his most recent feature (3 Faces), Panah emerges with Hit the Road as a filmmaker with a slyly unclassifiable take on the family road movie. Panah has called Hit the Road in many ways “the opposite of Jafar’s cinema,” but the film shares at least one key quality with his father’s work: It’s […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Apr 22, 2022 -
Watch: Jafar Panahi Speaks in Favor of the Iran Deal
Jafar Panahi has succeeded in making three features since being sentenced from filmmaking for 20 years, and now he’s contributed a brief video statement to We Support Iran Deal, a self-described group of “Iran’s pro-democracy & human rights activists, prominent artists, & cultural figures.” A full translation can be found here.
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 25, 2015 -
Trailer Watch and Poster: Jafar Panahi’s Taxi
Here’s the US trailer and poster for Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, the third film the Iranian director has made despite an official 20-year-ban on him making movies. Behind the wheel, Panahi criss-crosses Tehran, picking up passengers whose interactions with him again blur the line between fact and fiction. The film will be playing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival before in opening in New York on October 2, with limited national release to follow. A current list of scheduled playdates and more information from distributor Kino Lorber can be found here. You can also check out two scenes from the film we posted […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 17, 2015 -
Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015 -
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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 17, 2015 -
Berlinale 2015: Jafar Panahi, Promising Newcomers and the Decline of Terrence Malick
In the weeks leading up to this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the festival’s press office revealed an increasingly enticing succession of titles competing in its main slate, generating very high expectations. Somewhat incredibly, they were met. While the Berlinale’s Competition customarily offers a few good films amongst a lot of mediocrity, the trend was reversed this time around, with easily the most outstanding selection in recent memory. In an equally welcome turn, the prizes awarded by Darren Aronofsky’s jury fully reflected the program’s quality, rewarding the most deserving entries while confirming the Berlinale’s avidly nurtured reputation as the most politically […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 17, 2015 -
Previewing Berlinale 2015: Malick, Herzog, Panahi and More
Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 4, 2015
