Dissident Cinema: A conversation between Jafar Panahi and Jamsheed Akrami

Along with Abbas Kiarosatmi and Asghar Farhadi, Jafar Panahi is one of Iran's most celebrated filmmakers. He's also perhaps the most decorated, having won the top awards at the Venice Film Festival for The Circle and the Berlin Film Festival for Taxi. Panahi is a favorite at Cannes, where he took home the Camera d'Or for his debut The White Balloon, and the Un Certain Regard jury award for Crimson Gold. He has accomplished all this despite having had more run-ins with Iran's Islamic government than any other artist working today. In 2009, his incarceration while shooting a film about Iran's street protests provoked an international uproar, forcing the government to release him after three months. Although an Islamic court subsequently sought to punish him with a six-year jail sentence and a 20-year ban from filmmaking, Panahi has courageously defied the ban and surreptitiously continued to make films. The following is a conversation between Jafar Panahi and the film scholar Jamsheed Akrami on free expression, or the lack thereof, in Iranian cinema over the past 50 years. Akrami is a professor of film at William Paterson University and the director of a trilogy of documentaries on Iranian film: The Lost Cinema, on Iranian cinema before the revolution, Friendly Persuasion, on Iranian cinema after the revolution, and A Cinema of Discontent, on film censorship in Iran, all of which are available through the distribution company Kino Lorber.

Jamsheed Akrami:

Iranian artists and intellectuals have never been blessed with freedom of expression. While the censorship under the Shah was harsh, it wasn't as oppressive as it's been under the Islamic government, which came to power in 1979. The changes in censorship were reflective of Iran's transition from a modern dictatorship to a totalitarian theocracy. You must have been a teenager during the last years of the Shah. What were you doing during the revolution?

Jafar Panahi:

I was 18 and in my last year of high school. My classmates and I were among the first groups of people that started shutting down schools and demonstrating in the streets. My wife jokingly likes to remind me that I was responsible for ruining the country. But back then everybody was actively involved, from the extreme right to the extreme left. It was a popular revolution and people were hoping for a democratic society, which unfortunately didn't materialize.

I grew up in a poor neighborhood in south Tehran, where political issues were not a priority. My whole family worked blue-collar jobs, and I first became aware of class differences when my father and I were painting an army general's house. Free expression was not allowed in the country; I remember one day a university student showed me a caricature of the Shah, and was very cautious and secretive about it.

Akrami:

The last decade of the Shah's rule saw the flourishing of the Iranian New Wave, which was a politically bold and aesthetically innovative film movement. It was somewhat similar to the French New Wave, as it grew out of progressive filmmakers' deepening disenchantment with the status quo in Iranian cinema, but it was much more influenced by Italian neorealism in its depiction of the plights of individuals caught in unfortunate social circumstances. However, the movement didn't weaken the hold of mainstream films, known as filmfarsi, which were escapist and uninterested in matters of social conscience. Were you following the New Wave films?

Panahi:

I only became interested in New Wave films when I was older and could recognize the creative role of the directors. My father loved the filmfarsis that featured well-known movie stars. So those were the first movies I saw. He was a house painter and in the summers I would help him out. I remember one day he asked me to stay at a worksite and take care of business in his absence. But I decided to go to the movies instead. Guess what? My father was in the same movie theater and didn...