This Is Not a Film (این یک فیلم نیست)

Plot

The film takes place over a single day, Fireworks Wednesday, the Persian New Year, inside the high-rise Tehran apartment where Jafar Panahi (Jafar Panahi) is confined while his appeal is pending. It opens with him on the phone, describing his legal situation in the flattest possible terms: sentenced to six years in prison and banned for twenty years from filmmaking, writing, and giving interviews, for the crime of "propaganda against the system."²⁰ Then the phone call ends, and the film simply stays with him.

The day is made of almost nothing. He eats fruit. He talks to his mother on the phone. Friends and family call to ask how he is holding up. His pet iguana, Igi, keeps trying to climb onto the table and keeps failing, a running gag that becomes the film's quiet emblem: an animal built for something larger than this apartment, trying anyway. Panahi films some of it himself; Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), a filmmaker friend who arrives partway through, handles the rest, and the two carry on a running conversation about whether what they are doing counts as a film at all. The title is the disclaimer, the defense, and the joke in one.

Banned from directing, Panahi wonders aloud whether reading a script might be legal. He pulls out an old screenplay he never shot: a female student barred by her autocratic family from attending university, locked in her bedroom while her parents go on holiday, who falls in love with a boy she watches day after day from her window in the alley below. The love story turns dark. The boy, it emerges, is a government agent.²¹

The centerpiece is Panahi's attempt to stage this screenplay alone, on his living-room floor, with masking tape. Words alone will not carry it, so he starts to perform it. He lays strips of masking tape on the carpet to mark out the confines of the girl's room, a device compared to Lars von Trier's chalk-drawn town in Dogville.²¹ He plays the roles himself, blocks the action, narrates the scenes, and gradually finds that he cannot do it. The voice cracks. There are no actors, no set, no permission, and the story will not come alive this way. He gives up, declaring that the film cannot be told like this, and the failure is real, not a performance of failure. Cinema, the sequence argues, is not equipment or permission; it is a person with an image in their head trying to communicate it, and no decree can reach that.

As evening falls, Panahi stands on his balcony filming the Fireworks Wednesday revelry below with his iPhone, fireworks crackling across the city, an image that reads as a statement: directing is a more defiant act than lighting a firecracker.²² Mirtahmasb leaves. Panahi keeps the phone camera going.

The film's celebrated final sequence is an unplanned long descent in the elevator with a stranger. A young man arrives, saying he is an art student substituting as the building's janitor, and he has come to collect the garbage.²³ The film never settles whether he is real, a government spy, or an actor. Panahi rides down with him in a lift that unavoidably suggests a jail cell, recording the slow, often comical process of the garbage collection, interviewing the young man floor by floor.²⁴ When they reach the ground floor, the young man warns him: "Mr. Panahi, please don't come outside. They'll see you with the camera."²⁰ Beyond the gate, through the lens of Panahi's camera, an enormous bonfire blazes in the courtyard, and that image is the film's last.²³ It is the only moment in the film where Panahi points a camera at a stranger and follows, and it reads as both an accident of documentary instinct and a promise: the ban can take his sets, his actors, his name on a credits line, but not his eye. The world outside the apartment is still there, still filmable, waiting.

Near the end, after a pause that feels like the last of his hope slipping away, Panahi asks: "If we could tell a film, why make a film?"²¹ The question is the film's thesis and its loophole. Roger Ebert described the final scene as one of overwhelming power, unplanned, like the little actress taking the cast off her arm in it.²⁵

Characters

Jafar Panahi (Jafar Panahi) is himself, not an actor playing a part: one of Iran's most celebrated directors, 50 years old at the time, confined to his apartment while awaiting appeal. He is restless, self-deprecating, dryly funny, occasionally petty about small discomforts, and the film's honesty about his boredom and frustration is what makes the gravity underneath land.²⁶

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) is the documentary filmmaker friend who arrives partway through, operates the camera, and debates with Panahi whether any of this constitutes a film. His presence turns a lonely self-portrait into a two-handed conversation about what cinema is.

The young janitor, an art student collecting the garbage, appears only in the final sequence and is the film's most discussed figure precisely because the film never tells us whether he is real, a spy, or an actor.²³

Interpretations and controversies

The film's very existence was a controversy. Panahi had spoken out against Iran's regime during the 2009 Green Revolution and was subsequently sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty-year filmmaking ban; he made this film in 2010 while under house arrest.²⁷ The finished work was loaded onto a USB drive concealed in a cake and mailed to Paris, arriving in time for a last-minute Cannes premiere.²⁸ One critic called its appearance at Cannes more dramatic than the festival's expulsion of Lars von Trier that same year.²⁰ The costs continued after the premiere: Mirtahmasb was denied permission to attend the Toronto screening, was arrested, and was banned from filmmaking on charges of conspiring to spy for the BBC.²⁸

Critics have debated the identity of the young janitor since Cannes, and the question is left deliberately unresolved.²³ Panahi's closing question, "If we could tell a film, why make a film?", is framed by critics as a work of defiant hope rather than defeat.²¹