Jafar Panahi asks for Golden Bear winner Taxi to be shown in Iran

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/17/jafar-panahi-golden-bear-taxi-iran

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Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director who won the top Golden Bear prize at the Berlin film festival for Taxi, has pleaded with Iran to screen it, saying “no prize is worth as much as my compatriots being able to see my films.”

In an interview with Iranian media following his win, Panahi said: “I’m really happy for me and for Iranian cinema,” but took the opportunity to decry the Iranian government. “The people in power accuse us of making films for foreign festivals. They hide behind political walls and don’t say that our films are never authorised for screening in Iranian cinemas.”

Taxi, which stars Panahi as a taxi driver ferrying a series of characters around Tehran, is not without politically charged content. Like his 2006 film Offside, which depicts a group of football-mad schoolgirls trying to watch a World Cup qualifier despite women not being allowed into the stadium, Taxi features a storyline about a woman jailed for trying to watch a men’s volleyball match.

In 2010, Panahi was convicted of spreading anti-government propaganda and endangering national security with his work, and was sentenced to a jail term and a ban on film-making. While he has never had to serve his prison time, he was placed first under house arrest, during which he made his film This Is Not a Film, which was famously smuggled to the Cannes film festival on a USB stick hidden in a cake.

He has since been allowed to move more freely around Iran, though his passport has not been returned to him, making travel to film festivals such as Berlin impossible.

There was an awkward response from the Iranian government’s film arm, the Cinema Organisation, whose Hojjatollah Ayyubi celebrated Panahi’s win and even his flouting of his film-making ban, while simultaneously accusing the festival of spreading “misunderstandings”. “I regret that you wish to drive everybody in a taxi of new misunderstandings about the Iranian people by screening a film made by a director who has been banned by law from making films,” Ayyubi said. “But nevertheless, he has done exactly that. I am delighted to announce that the director of Taxi continues to drive in the fast lane of his life, freely enjoying all of its blessings.”

Panahi is in a kind of judicial limbo in Iran, with the authorities technically able to swoop in and clamp down on his film-making, perhaps even sending him to jail. But they may be less likely to do so following such a high-profile international success; as the director of an Asian film festival told Variety, the win puts Panahi “in a better spot”.

In January, Panahi made a passionate statement about the ban and his creative vision, writing: “Nothing can prevent me from making films since when being pushed to the ultimate corners I connect with my inner-self and, in such private spaces, despite all limitations, the necessity to create becomes even more of an urge.”

On announcing the Berlin win, which was collected by Panahi’s niece Hana Saeidi who also stars in Taxi, jury head Darren Aronofsky said: “Instead of allowing his spirit to be crushed and giving up, instead of allowing himself to be filled with anger and frustration, Jafar Panahi created a love letter to cinema. His film is filled with love for his art, his community, his country and his audience.”

After being conscripted in the early 1980s, Panahi’s film career began as an army cinematographer – complete with brief imprisonment by Kurdish rebels – before he trained in Tehran, moving onto TV documentaries and eventually feature films. His breakthrough came with The White Balloon (1995), which earned him the Camera d’Or prize at Cannes, the first major award for an Iranian film-maker at the festival. His films then moved into more strident and political territory, as in The Circle (2000), a study of four women subjugated by Iran’s regime, and Crimson Gold (2003), which focuses on an impoverished man driven to petty crime – the latter earned Panahi his second Cannes triumph, the Un Certain Regard award.

Elsewhere at this year’s Berlin festival, there was a one-two triumph for 45 Years, the new film from UK film-maker Andrew Haigh, whose low-budget gay romance Weekend was a breakthrough cult hit in 2011. Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, the stars of 45 Years, picked up the Silver Bear awards for acting, for their performances as a couple grappling with a relationship crisis after decades of marriage. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw also applauded the film, saying it is “composed with rigour and exactitude and performed with a repressed, heartfelt passion. Courtenay, in particular, gives us what might actually be his finest hour.”

The best director prize was meanwhile shared by Malgorzata Szumowska of Poland for her supernatural black comedy Body, and Radu Jude of Romania, for his drama Aferim set in the late-feudal Balkans.