A ‘non-film’ about not being allowed to make a film

How do you make a film if you’ve been banned from directing or editing or scriptwriting for 20 years and put under house arrest? This Is Not A Film is the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s answer to this question, finds G Sampath

For a film that is not even a film, Panahi’s latest “effort”, as he calls it, was one of the most popular screenings at the 12th Osian Cinefan film festival that concluded in the capital last week. It was one of the films showcased in the category ‘Freedom of Creative Expression’. A winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1995 Cannes film festival for his film The White Balloon and the Golden Lion at the 2000 Venice film festival for The Circle (banned in Iran), Panahi is one of the leading lights of Iranian New Wave cinema. But right now, Panahi, 52, cannot make a film until 2030.

An outspoken supporter of the opposition Green party, he was arrested by the Iranian government in 2010, and after being convicted of “colluding in gathering and making propaganda” against the Islamic regime, was sentenced to six years in jail. Though he was released on a bail of $200,000, he lives under the threat of being sent back to jail any time. Also, he cannot travel abroad or talk to the media.

Telling a film
Panahi’s non-film opens with the director trying to find out from his lawyer if anything will come of his appeal against the court verdict sentencing him to six years. He learns that there is a good chance he will go to jail, and that the appeals court is unlikely to lift the ban on filmmaking.

Panahi then potters around the house, making breakfast, feeding his daughter’s pet iguana, Igi, and missing his family’s New Year celebrations because of his house arrest. Bored and fretful, he calls one of his friends, a documentary filmmaker called Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, home.

Mirtahmasb (credited as co-director) then follows Panahi around the house with a camera as the latter enacts and ‘talks out’ the script of his next film, which, too, has not been approved by the authorities. It is about a girl who is locked up in her house by her family because they don’t want her to study at the university. The parallel between Panahi’s house arrest and the girl’s incarceration is evident in the valiant passion with which Panahi tries to bring the script to life. He might have been banned from directing a film, but “I have not been banned from acting or describing a screenplay,” Panahi reminds his friend.

In one of the funnier moments of the film, Panahi pauses to take his medicines. When Mirtahmasb keeps the camera on, Panahi tells him to ‘cut’ it. “You can’t direct anymore, remember? You’ll be breaking the law,” the latter reminds him.

The absurdity of trying to make a film while being confined to his apartment soon gets to Panahi. He pauses abruptly in the middle of his narration, looking suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue. As the camera keeps rolling, he muses, “If we could tell a film, then why make a film?”

From here on the film takes a different turn, as Mirtahmasb has to leave for home. An arts student moonlighting as a garbage man turns up, and Panahi follows him from floor to floor of the high rise as the latter goes about collecting trash.

The film ends with Panahi on the ground floor of his apartment complex, shooting a New Year bonfire outside the gates, and you can hear the garbage man exhorting him to go back inside as he could get into trouble if spotted.

The brief end credits of this non-film thank colleagues who are left unnamed, for obvious reasons. Mirtahmasb, however, was reportedly arrested for the trouble he took to not make a film.

Censorship as contraceptive
This Is Not A Film was smuggled out of Iran in a USB drive concealed in a cake, and is being screened at every major film festival in the world. Film luminaries like Martin Scorsese, Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg and Juliette Binoche have campaigned for Panahi’s release. According to the latest media reports, Panahi is not under house arrest anymore but could be sent to jail anytime, and the 20-year ban still stands.

This unclassifiable film — at best, you could call it a video diary of a director under house arrest — brings home both the compelling power of cinema as a medium, and the very absurdity of censorship as an idea.

Of course, it would be an understatement to speak of Panahi’s plight in terms of censorship. You force the director to cut a few scenes, or you ban a film — you could call it censorship. But here’s a director whose entire corpus of future work has been censored, as it were. If conventional censorship can be likened to infanticide, this is like contraception — make sure the damn fellow produces nothing. In that sense, This Is Not A Film is a miracle, a film that wasn’t made and yet exists, and speaks, with great eloquence, about the triumph of art and creativity over power and repression.

G Sampath is an independent writer based in Delhi. He’s reachable at sampath4office@gmail.com