Want to get into the films of Iran’s Jafar Panahi, who went from imprisonment to Cannes? He’s happy to help

As a child born in a working-class neighborhood in south Tehran, future director Jafar Panahi would save all the pocket change his father gave him so he could go to the movies. Yet it was a role in front of the camera that positioned him to become one of the most acclaimed and fearless filmmakers in the world.

A self-described “chunky kid” growing up in pre-Islamic Revolution times, Panahi was cast due to his build in a short film produced by Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. The educational piece required two children, one heavyset and one thin. While shooting his scenes at a local library, he was enticed by the camera.

“Unfortunately, there was a very stingy cameraman who would not let me get behind the camera,” Panahi says via an interpreter at a hotel in Santa Monica. “And this became my biggest wish, to see the world through the camera.”

Panahi, 65, has since had plenty of opportunities to fulfill his childhood dream, even if it has jeopardized his freedoms due to Iran’s theocratic regime. (He’s just landed in the U.S. after visa complications delayed his arrival to appear at multiple festivals.)

A victim of harsh repression tactics, Panahi has nonetheless continued to expose socially relevant themes in his native country including the treatment of women, the state’s constant surveillance of its citizens and the divide between economic classes. His bravery has resulted in jail sentences and severe restrictions on his ability to make movies.

A scene from Jafar Panahi’s movie “It Was Just an Accident.”

(Neon)

Today, his champions include director Martin Scorsese, who last week shared the stage with Panahi for a public conversation at the New York Film Festival, where the dissident artist’s latest movie, “It Was Just an Accident,” screened to a massive ovation. A morally layered political thriller arriving in theaters Wednesday, it follows a group of people who believe they have captured the man who tortured them while they were in prison.

In May, Panahi was knocked back in his seat after “It Was Just an Accident” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival — a kind of cosmic revenge against a government that has tried to silence him. The film, a co-production, is now France’s Oscar entry in the international feature race, since Iran itself would never consider submitting it.

Panahi is only the second Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or, the first being late director Abbas Kiarostami in 1997 for “Taste of Cherry.” When he was starting out, a young Panahi contacted Kiarostami, then shooting his 1994 film “Through the Olive Trees.” One day, Panahi recalls, Kiarostami drove him out of the city and asked him to wear a blindfold.

Movies

Jafar Panahi’s ‘It Was Just an Accident’ wins Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival

Awards for actor and director went to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ‘The Secret Agent,’ while two films tied for the Jury Prize, ‘Sirât’ and ‘Sound of Falling.’

May 24, 2025

They eventually arrived at a point where Kiarostami captured a pivotal shot in “Through the Olive Trees”: a young man and the girl he’s been chasing looking minuscule against a vast, hilly, green landscape. It was then that Panahi understood what defined Kiarostami’s vision and how it differed from his own.

“Anywhere we went after that, I noticed that Kiarostami would choose where he’s sitting in a way that he would be facing nature,” Panahi recalls. “But I always chose my seat in a way that I would be facing people. He saw people in long shots in nature. I saw them in close-ups.”

Panahi admired Kiarostami’s connection with the essential beauty of nature. He, meanwhile, would be fascinated by people’s behavior and interpersonal relationships within a society.

The Times sat down with Panahi to discuss his most notable films.

A scene from 1995’s “The White Balloon,” Jafar Panahi’s feature debut.

(JP Productions)

Originally commissioned as a short film for Iranian state TV, Panahi’s delightful feature debut, “The White Balloon” (1995), follows two siblings on a futile mission to buy a goldfish during the Persian New Year celebration.

Even at the outset of his career, Panahi is infusing social commentary through the characters the children encounter, in particular an Afghan boy not much older than the protagonists, who has to work selling balloons instead of enjoying the holiday.

Still, it was easier to make a film like “The White Balloon” than something more explicitly political since censorship was less strictly enforced on films with stories about children.

“I used to say what the adults wanted to say through the words of children,” Panahi remembers. “But then I decided that I had to get directly at it.” Eventually he’d leave behind his child protagonists.

Though he doesn’t find children particularly challenging to work with, Panahi says that for him to cast a role, he must first go to the real environments where the character would exist. For instance, in “The White Balloon,” he needed a tailor.

“I started visiting tailor shops and the first thing that mattered was for the tailor to match the physical appearance of the character that I had in mind,” he says.

Panahi believes anyone can act as long as they are picked correctly. “If anyone doesn’t act well, it’s not their fault, it’s the fault of the director,” he says.

A scene from 2000’s “The Circle.”

(JP Productions / Everett Collection)

At a time when other filmmakers wouldn’t dare take on state-sanctioned sexism, Panahi and screenwriter Kambuzia Partovi were pioneers in depicting the issues facing Iranian women with 2000’s “The Circle.” The film strings together the stories of several women, some of whom have just been released from prison, as they help each other navigate a restricted existence in a patriarchal reality.

“I consider myself a socially engaged filmmaker and I thought: What are some of the subjects that I could get from society?” Panahi says. “And I focused on limitations. Who are the most limited people in society? Naturally it was the women.”

Constant surveillance, an inability to make decisions without the permission of a husband and even being stigmatized for smoking are among the tensions depicted in “The Circle.”

Today, in the aftermath of the Women, Life, Freedom movement that was sparked in 2022, Panahi believes things have changed to a degree, but also haven’t. “Not that the regime decided to lift the restrictions — people themselves lifted the restrictions,” he says. “And now on the surface it looks like there are no restrictions, but in reality there are new ones.”

Still, “The Circle,” which received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, remains a searing indictment. “A film is always relevant,” Panahi says. “Either it is alive and it’s doing its job in the moment, or it is alive because it has documented history.”

A scene from Jafar Panahi’s 2006 movie “Offside.”

(JP Productions)

Panahi revisited gender-based discrimination with 2006’s “Offside.” Since women were entirely forbidden from entering soccer stadiums (these days they are allowed into certain matches), a teenage girl finds herself trying to force her way in disguised as a man to watch a World Cup qualifying match.

Told via amusing situations mined from reality — there is no women’s restroom in the stadium — Panahi uses the game to put a spotlight on Iranian youth.“Women wanting to be at a stadium, I believe, is about expressing themselves and it’s about taking a right that has been taken away from them,” the director says.

The anthem heard in the film, he explains, is not the official national anthem of today’s Iran, but an older song that people identify with, rather than one that the regime has assigned them.

“The patriotism that’s in the film doesn’t have a sense of nationalism about the country,” he says. “It is about a homeland that is not blindly following a certain ideology. It’s saying: I want this homeland in the way that I want it, not in the way you dictate me to want it.”

It was after “Offside” that Panahi’s legal troubles escalated. In 2009, after attending a protest in support of a murdered student, he was forbidden from leaving the country. Then a year later, Panahi received a 20-year ban from making films and a sentence of six years in prison, for what the Iranian government deemed “propaganda against the state.” Though he was released on bail after serving two months, his freedom continued to be threatened.

Jafar Panahi in his 2011 meta-movie “This Is Not a Film.”

(JP Productions)

Banned from making films, Panahi turned himself the subject for the first time in 2011’s “This Is Not a Film,” a documentary shot in his own house with the help of filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, that sees him grappling with his challenging circumstances and with filmmaking itself. Discussing unmade films and dealing with an unruly pet iguana, Panahi renders an illuminating self-portrait.

“I thought, ‘I have spent my entire life on this and now how can I let go of it?’” Panahi says. “They’ve told me not to make a film, so now I’m going to write the story of a filmmaker talking about making a film with his friend and I’m going to call it ‘This Is Not a Film.’”

Panahi compares his own artistic defiance to the determination of the women in “Offside.”

“This is the same reclaiming of the rights that are taken away,” he adds. “And I still found a way — like the women in ‘Offside’ found a way.”

A scene from Jafar Panahi’s 2015 movie “Taxi.”

(JP Productions)

During his first interrogation by the Iranian authorities, Panahi remembers being asked why he makes films about controversial issues. The only answer he could articulate is that it’s out of his control.

“I told my interrogator, ‘Look, you are questioning me now. It’s not in my control. But sooner or later, this interrogation is going to find its way into my films.’ And it’s not something that I have control over but it just happens automatically,” he says.

Indeed, the interrogation found its way into “Taxi,” Panahi’s playful 2015 docufiction, at once humorous and revealing, made in secret. Playing himself, the filmmaker drives a cab around Tehran engaging with a variety of passengers: a bootleg DVD seller, an injured man and his distraught wife, two elderly women in a rush.

With the camera on the dashboard, the vehicle becomes a surreptitious mobile set with Panahi and his co-stars mostly improvising their dialogue, some of it as cutting as anything intentional.

“At some point, I think I hear a sound,” he remembers of a moment during the shoot. “I stopped the car and I asked my niece if she also heard it and she says, ‘No.’ Then you see Nasrin Sotoudeh [a human rights lawyer who appears in the film] come in and I ask her if she heard it, and she says, ‘No.’ But she also says that this is the problem of all former political prisoners: They constantly think that they’re hearing voices.”

A scene from the 2022 movie “No Bears.”

(JP Productions)

Still formally banned by authorities from making his art, Panahi continued to push the boundaries of his punishment in “No Bears” (2022), in which he once again plays a semi-fictionalized version of himself who must fulfill his burning desire to direct, even if through surrogates, near the Iranian border with Turkey.

“They tell you that you cannot travel anywhere, so you think about a film in which you have to travel,” he says, playfully. “You go to the border, you send your team to the other side and control them through a messaging app like WhatsApp, and you make your film.”

Panahi remembers students coming up to him to complain about the difficulty of making films in Iran. “Am I going to start complaining like my students or am I going to find a way?” he asks. “And now you see that the best films in Iranian cinema these days are made in the way that we got started” — made clandestinely, he means.

Panahi always prefers to occupy himself rather than dwell on his conditions.

Following the premiere of “No Bears” and Panahi’s advocacy for other imprisoned filmmakers, the Iranian government enforced Panahi’s original six-year sentence behind bars. It was only after a hunger strike, seven months in, that he was released in early 2023.

Defiant as ever, Panahi premiered “It Was Just an Accident” two years later.

“They have forced me to become part of the story,” he says with an air of inevitability. “And then nothing is difficult because you are determined to find a solution to what they don’t want you to do.”