In May of 2025, Jafar Panahi won the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or, for his film “It Was Just an Accident,” a stark drama about several former prisoners who debate whether to kill a man they believe tortured them when they were inmates. Rather surprisingly, the government of Iran actually allowed Panahi to leave the country and attend the festival. When he returned to Tehran, I read, one of the first things he did was to visit the grave of Abbas Kiarostami. The gesture was altogether appropriate: Not only was Kiarostami the only Iranian director to have previously won the Palme d’or (for “Taste of Cherry” in 1997), he was also Panahi’s mentor; the two had a creative relationship that spanned decades prior to Kiarostami’s death in 2016.
“It Was Just an Accident” has been winning awards and audiences around the world since May and is now considered a leading candidate for one or more Oscar nominations. But Panahi’s road to this juncture has not been easy. At the New York Film Festival in October, he told Martin Scorsese that when he saw his movie premiere at Cannes, it was the first time he had watched one of his films with an audience in 17 years – a hardship that most filmmakers can scarcely imagine. Since 2010, the Iranian regime has imprisoned him, banned him from making films, writing screenplays and giving interviews, and prevented him from leaving the country. Yet he has persisted, making low-budget films without official permission and smuggling them out of the country to foreign festivals. “Accident” is the sixth such film he’s made since the original ban was handed down.
The restrictions Panahi has labored under obviously affect the world’s perception of him. Most filmmakers, when they release a major work, spend a year or more on the road: attending festivals, speaking with audiences, doing publicity, giving countless interviews. That Panahi has been unable to any of this has, I believe, inevitably meant that his work prior to “Accident” is less well-known than it deserves to be. Rectifying that was one of two goals I had in programming the festival “Panahi & Kiarostami: Two Masters” (Jan. 2-8 at the IFC Center in New York). The other goal was to place Panahi’s career in the context of Iranian cinema, specifically the crucial relationship with Kiarostami.
From a historical perspective, the filmmakers represent the two great eras of Iran’s cinema: the pre-revolutionary and the post-revolutionary. Starting in 1970, 30-year-old Kiarostami began making short films, mainly about children, for the government-sponsored Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. He honed his craft during these years, yet the films, and two features he made in the 1970s, reached few audiences outside Iran. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, however, the government of the Islamic Republic set out to revive the country’s cinema, and Kiarostami was one of the pre-revolutionary directors invited to resume working. His first post-revolutionary feature, “Where Is the Friend’s House?” (1986), about a rural schoolboy’s effort to return a friend’s notebook, took several awards at the Locarno Film Festival, launching Kiarostami internationally. His third feature, “And Life Goes On” (1992), about the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, was taken up by Cannes, where he began getting critical attention in earnest.
Although other Iranian filmmakers were far more celebrated in the early post-revolutionary period, Kiarostami was evidently on Panahi’s mind from early on. After serving in the Iran-Iraq war and then making several short documentaries, he directed his first narrative short, “The Friend” (1992), as a tribute to Kiarostami’s first short, “Bread and Alley.” Not long after, he called and left a message on Kiarostami’s answering machine expressing admiration for his films and a desire to work with him. Just beginning to work on “Through the Olive Trees” (1994), about the making of “And Life Goes On,” Kiarostami invited Panahi to join him; Panahi is seen in the film acting as assistant director.
Something even more significant for Panahi’s career, though, happened during this shoot. He had an idea for a feature, and Kiarostami not only liked it but offered to write the script, dictating pages as they drove to and from the set. Although the film, about a girl’s effort to buy a goldfish for her New Year’s celebration, fell into the Kiarostami-initiated genre of child-centered films, it was different in one respect: unlike his films, it centered on a girl. Panahi found one named Aida Mohammadkhani, who gave a remarkable performance in the role; the film also demonstrated his skills supervising editing and cinematography.
“The White Balloon” (1995), Panahi’s feature debut, became the first post-revolutionary film to win a major international prize, Cannes’ Camera d’Or for best first film. It was also the first Iranian film to become a global art-house hit, and in Japan it won a prize that carried a large cash award with it. Unlike Iranian directors who “climbed the ladder” by making films that got Iranian recognition before reaching world audiences, Panahi had a very successful international career from the first.
With Kiarostami’s second post-revolutionary feature, “Close-Up” (1990), a fascinating docudrama about a poor man arrested for impersonating the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the director had effectively inaugurated another de facto Iranian genre: films about filmmakers and film’s social impact (including class differences). He extended the genre with the subsequent dramas “And Life Goes On,” about a film director trying to discover if the kids who acted in his earlier film survived an earthquake, and “Through the Olive Trees,” about the making of the previous film. (Critics dubbed these two films and the earlier “Where Is the Friend’s House?” The Koker Trilogy, for the village where much of their action is set.)
For his follow-up to “The White Balloon,” Panahi started out with a premise that looked like another Kiarostami-esque kid-on-a-quest tale: when no one shows up to collect her after school, a little girl sets off across Tehran on her own to find home. Midway through the story, however, something happens: the child actor (Aida Mohammadkhani again) declares she’s sick of filming, takes off her mic, and darts out into the city. Thus does “The Mirror” (1997) suddenly morph into a Kiarostami-esque self-reflexive tale about filmmakers and filmmaking (playing the director, Panahi appears in the film, much as Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf did in “Close-Up.”) But this would be the last time critics could regard Panahi’s work as “school of Kiarostami.”
In retrospect, it seems that the late ‘90s brought a darkening mood to Iranian cinema, and Kiarostami – by then that cinema’s leading figure internationally – was ready to leave behind both lyrical films about children and witty, complex “meta” stories about filmmakers and filmmaking. “Taste of Cherry,” the film he sent to Cannes in 1997, was something stark and new: the tale of a man motoring around Tehran trying to find someone who will help him commit suicide. Although he appears to be a well-off professional, we are told nothing about the main character’s life or why he would want to end it. But neither does the film tell us that life in post-revolutionary Iran was not the reason: everything, including the character’s ultimate fate, is left to the viewer’s imagination.
In my book In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema, I note that when I first encountered Iranian films in the early ‘90s, I half expected to find a dissident cinema, like some of the film and literature from the Soviet Union prior to 1989. What I found instead were buoyant films about kids and clever, sophisticated films about filmmaking (more like Russian films of the ‘20s, when the spirit of revolution was still in the air). In my view, “Taste of Cherry,” which divided critics but won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, was the film that didn’t announce, but rather signaled, a pivot toward dissidence.
However, what was arguably implicit in Kiarostami’s film became quite explicit in Panahi’s third feature. “The Circle” (2000) is a very striking and daring film. Following the stories of four women (grown-ups, not kids), it makes clear the harsh restrictions and forces that delimit the lives of Iran’s female population under the Islamist regime. The film’s ingenious use of sound and its varied visual language demonstrate Panahi’s skills as a stylist. Upon completion, and without the permission of the Iranian government, “The Circle” was sent to the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion. It was banned in Iran.
In speaking of “The Circle,” and many films afterwards, Panahi said that he’s not a political filmmaker, but rather an artist who makes films about social subjects. In any case, it’s worth noting that the fact that he had an international audience and backers meant that he was in the rare position for an Iranian filmmaker of being able to make films that were likely to be kept from domestic distribution. That factor led some women to charge that the film’s narrative involves distortions meant to mirror the prejudices of foreign viewers.
For his next film Panahi returned to collaboration with Kiarostami. A true-crime tale, “Crimson Gold” (2003) begins in an upscale jewelry store where apparently a murder and a suicide take place; the film then flashes back to show what led to this juncture. Kiarostami wrote the screenplay based on a news item he had read. Panahi’s confident direction emphasized realism in its depiction of both the criminal underclass and the wealthy in Tehran. The result is a very pointed and original film on a subject of interest to both Kiarostami and Panahi: class inequities in post-revolutionary Iran.
“Offside” (2006), Panahi’s next film, returned to the subject of “The Circle,” female oppression, but with a tone that was much lighter and that depicted women’s agency and resistance. The premise: a group of young girls disguise themselves as boys to sneak into Azadi Stadium to see a World Cup playoff match. (Iranians are huge soccer fans, but after the Revolution, the regime banned women from attending matches to keep them from seeing men in shorts and tight-fitting shirts, and to prevent the mixing of sexes.) Panahi submitted a fake script to obtain permission to shoot the film, which was done in actual matches. Toward the end of filming, the government tried to shut it down but the project was completed and the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. (Twenty years later, the “open stadiums” movement in Iran continues.)
In many ways, the 1990s in Iranian cinema belonged to Kiarostami due to the wide acclaim earned by the five features he released during the decade, culminating with “The Wind Will Carry Us” (1999), a prize winner at Venice but the last celluloid feature he shot in Iran (thereafter he turned to low-budget digital documentaries and experimental films and two features he made outside Iran). The next decade, the first of the new century, was, in the largest sense, Panahi’s: “The Circle,” “Crimson Gold” and “Offside” showed him at the height of his powers as a storyteller and stylist in making full-scale dramatic features. But all three films were banned in Iran, setting up an oppositional relationship between Panahi and the regime that would greatly complicate his life and art in the next decade.
In July of 2009, protests broke out across Iran after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Panahi was arrested near the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman who had been gunned down during the protests. He was able to contact friends and fellow filmmakers, and their pressure helped secure his release. However, on March 1, 2010, his home was raided by police and Panahi, his wife, daughter and 15 friends were arrested and taken to the infamous Evin Prison. Most were soon released, but not Panahi. His arrest sparked wave after wave of protests in the Iranian film community and around the world. In New York, I joined with several friends to organize a petition by prominent American moviemakers demanding his release. He was finally released on bail in late May. (His struggles with the regime throughout this period were shared by his friend Mohammad Rasoulof, who had to leave Iran to complete his 2024 film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.”)
Having seen the Iranian government back off from situations after it received massive international bad publicity, I assumed Panahi would receive a slap on the wrist at most. So I was shocked when he went to trial in December, 2010, and, convicted of “propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” was sentenced to six years in prison and 20 years of not making movies, writing screenplays, giving interviews or leaving Iran. The following October, a court upheld the ban but the prison sentence was replaced by house arrest.
I’m not sure why the ban on Panahi’s travel was lifted in 2025, but in December, after he had been promoting “It Was Just an Accident” internationally since Cannes, an Iranian court sentenced him in absentia to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban for “propaganda activities” against the regime. Did the authorities think this sentence would persuade him to avoid Iran and settle in another country, as other Iranian directors have? If so, they missed their mark. Panahi announced that he would return to Iran after the upcoming Oscar season concludes.
Sentenced to 20 years of not making films, Panahi reacted as you might expect: by continuing to make films – albeit in semi-secrecy, with minimal budgets and without the official permissions that Iranian features are supposed to have. His next five films extend the Kiarostamian tradition of films about filmmaking and filmmakers; Panahi stars in all of them. It’s noteworthy that as they progress, the films widen the director’s geographical purview: from being confined to his home, to a secluded villa on the Caspian Sea, to a wide-ranging tour of Tehran’s streets, to highways and landscapes in northwestern Iran.
“This Is Not a Film” (2011), one of Panahi’s wittiest works, shows that his spirits were not about to be dampened by the government’s draconian punishments. As such, the homemade doc is a mirthful and exuberant act of defiance. Aided by filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Panahi shows himself discussing his legal case on the phone, talking about cinema and his future plans, and demonstrating the capacity of new digital technology to allow an artist to create an entire feature at home. Once completed, the not-a-film was smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive and premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival; it was subsequently distributed worldwide and shortlisted for the Documentary Oscar.
“Closed Curtain” (2013) is like the flipside of the previous film: dramatic rather documentary and depressive rather than defiant. I once described a Kiarostami film as “Rossellini twined with Pirandello,” and this film exhibits a similar conjunction. Co-directed by Kambozi Partovi, it starts out depicting three characters taking refuge in a house on the Caspian Sea, then halfway through comes a “coup de cinema” like that in “The Mirror”: Panahi himself appears and the film shifts into what I called in my review “a kind of subjective surrealism – call it a documentary about the inside of Panahi’s head in recent years.” The film won Panahi the Silver Bear for Best Script at the 2013 Berlin festival.
“Taxi” (2015). Anyone who’s visited Tehran knows how its streets are like a vast dramatic-comedic stage for the zany culture of taxis (often shared) and taxi drivers. In this pseudo-documentary, Panahi plays a taxi driver and gets a lot of self-evident pleasure not only from his freedom to roam around the city but also from the stories and observations he elicits from his passengers. The film won Berlin’s top prize, the Golden Bear.
“3 Faces” (2018) continues Panahi’s arguments against the treatment of women under the Islamic Republic while paying tribute to three generation of Iranian actresses – and would-be actresses. Starting out with an apparent video suicide note from an aspiring young actress, the film then sends Panahi and real-life actress Behnaz Jafari on a road trip across northwestern Tehran in search of the girl’s fate. When I saw Panahi in Tehran in 2017, he told me he couldn’t make the film unless he found a female star; thankfully, Jafari was brave enough to take the role. When I saw him in early 2018, he was hoping the regime would let him go to Cannes to premiere the film. That didn’t happen, but the film won the Best Screenplay award for Panahi.
In “No Bears” (2022) the story finds Panahi on Iran’s border with Turkey directing a film by video remote about Iranians wanting to escape to Europe. But the biggest conflict he faces comes in the rural village where he’s staying. Writing about the film’s U.S. debut at the 2022 New York Film Festival, I said, “More than his other recent films, ‘No Bears’ shows the influence of Panahi’s mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, especially the Kiarostami films ‘Through the Olive Trees’ and ‘The Wind Will Carry Us.’ But perhaps most significant is that, rather than impugning the Islamic Republic, Panahi, like Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf before him, is interrogating the deep structures of Iran’s pre-modern, non-urban culture. The villagers’ antiquated morals and worldview, he implies, are what’s imprisoning them, not any political strictures.”
While all five of these recent films are fascinating and worthy of attention, “This Is Not a Film” and “No Bears” have my vote as this period’s essential masterpieces.
The Palme d’Or-winning “It Was Just an Accident” (2025) was his sixth film made without government approval, and it differs from its predecessors in certain respects, including that Panahi doesn’t appear in it. I’ll ask him why this is when we discuss his career and its relationship to Kiarostami’s work at the IFC Center on Jan. 5.
More than just representatives of two different generations and eras of Iranian cinema, Kiarostami and Panahi had different personalities and artistic aims. Kiarostami’s work was often called poetic and philosophical; an accomplished poet, artist and photographer, he made films that were steeped in the influences of Iran’s ancient literary and artistic traditions, yet also encompassed modernist and postmodern tendencies. Panahi’s work was more straightforward, focused on stylistic possibilities and current social realities, especially the challenges faced by women. From the first, Kiarostami was an experimenter and an innovator, especially in the genres of child-centered films and films about cinema itself. He blazed trails that others followed, none more assiduously or inventively than Panahi, whose homages extended and paid eloquent tribute to the importance of his mentor’s work.
Descended from the example of Italian neorealism, both directors were passionate about the cinema’s potential for healing the wounds of a society riven by age-old poverty and modern revolution and violence. Both gained worldwide reputations and depended on foreign audiences for the continuance of their careers, yet neither elected to move out of Iran, as Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beyzaie and others did. Kiarostami had films banned, but he was in Italy making “Certified Copy” when the “stolen election” that returned Ahmadinejad to power provoked protests that swept Panahi into the beginnings of his long battles with the current Iranian regime.
Having spent time with both Kiarostami and Panahi, I remember both for the irrepressible ebullience of their personalities. Whenever misfortunes or government-decreed hardships came their way, their reactions were usually grins, laughter and joking. Fortunately Kiarostami never went to prison. Panahi went, over and over, but has never wanted to say much about the cruelties that were visited upon him and his family, or about the tactics, including hunger strikes, that he was forced to adopt to survive and gain release.
I consider the courage and fortitude Panahi has displayed through these ordeals to be absolutely extraordinary. Cinema may have a range of masters on the level of Kiarostami and Panahi, but when has there ever been one who has been subjected to the prolonged hardships that Panahi has endured? That he is still determined to return to Iran and another prison sentence after the Oscars makes him seem akin to leaders like Vaclev Havel and Nelson Mandela, whose courage pointed toward a better day for their nations.
Panahi and Kiarostami Films: Significant Pairings.
When I proposed this series, I suggested that the films of Panahi and Kiarostami be grouped in pairings that might offer insights into some of the connections between the two directors’ work. While the IFC Center is not able to present these films as double features, I still hope viewers might think of them as “in conversation” with each other.
Childhood’s Challenges
“Where Is the Friend’s House?” is the lyrical comedy-drama that extended Kiarostami’s prer-evolutionary films about kids into the post-revolutionary era. He also scripted “The White Balloon,” Panahi’s highly successful feature debut which features a wonderful performance by little Aida Mohammadkhani.
Football Fever
In Panahi’s dramatic and often hilarious “Offside,” female soccer fans disguise themselves as boys to get into a World Cup playoff match. The Iranian obsession with the sport also figures into Kiarostami’s “And Life Goes On,” where a World Cup broadcast airs as a film director and his son motor through an earthquake’s recent devastation.
Cinema Captives
Arguably the greatest of all Iranian films, Kiarostami’s “Close-Up” documents the trial of a man arrested for impersonating a famous film director. A tribute to three generations of Iranian actresses, Panahi’s “3 Faces” is a road movie that points up both the importance and the difficulties faced by female performers in Iran’s cinema.
Panahi’s Presence
Panahi plays Kiarostami’s assistant director in “Through the Olive Trees,” an acclaimed film about the making of a previous film. He reappears as himself in his own “This Is Not a Film,” playing a director making a film after being banned from making films.
Dark Dramas
Kiarostami’s Palme d’Or winner “Taste of Cherry,” about a man seeking help in committing suicide, seemed to signal a dark turn in Iranian cinema. It may have inspired the acerbic tone of Panahi’s “The Circle,” which depicts the difficult lives forced on four women by conditions in the Islamic Republic.
Rustic Realities
Both Panahi’s “No Bears” and Kiarostami’s “The Wind Will Carry Us” show their protagonists confronting rural realities while shooting films/videos in far northwestern Iran. The films accentuate the backwardness of the place, but while Kiarostami uses the setting to construct an allegory about poetry, Panahi muses on the costs of ignorance.
Tehran Tours
Panahi’s “Taxi” and Kiarostami’s “Ten” largely take place in cars motoring around Tehran. (Both directors enjoyed driving in the city.) In Panahi’s film, he’s the genial taxi driver. In “Ten,” it’s a soccer mom well played by Mania Akbari. Both films have a strong documentary element and focus on the drivers’ interactions with passengers.
Poverty’s Price
The struggles of Iran’s underclass are depicted in Kiarostami’s pre-revolutionary debut, “The Traveler,” about a village boy who cheats his pals to get money to attend a soccer match in Tehran, and in a true-crime drama he wrote for Panahi to direct, “Crimson Gold,” about the plot to rob an upscale jewelry store.
Surreal Surprises
Panahi’s “Closed Curtain” and Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” both have narrative twists about midway through that evoke surrealism. In Panahi’s drama, the shift involves his view of his own predicament. In Kiarostami’s, it concerns the nature of the relationship between a married couple played by Juliette Binoche and William Shimell.
On Sunday, January 4, at 1:15pm, following the 11:30am screening of “Through the Olive Trees,” I will moderate a panel about Panahi and Kiarostami’s work that will also include Prof. Jamsheed Akrami, historian and writer Arash Azizi, film professor and former New York Film Festival head Richard Pena, and critic and translator Leslie Camhi.
On Monday, January 5, Jafar Panahi and I will discuss his work after the 6pm screening of “Through the Olive Trees.” And he will introduce the 8:35pm screening of “This Is Not a Film.”
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