“Um simple accident, de Jafar Panahi”
Panahi’s fists thrust into the air before coming down and resting on the back of his head. Black sunglasses don his eyes as he slowly lies back in his seat. The audience booms in applause as a sly smirk fights to stay within the confines of his face. The taste of victory sure is sweet.
After a career fighting censorship by the authoritarian Iranian regime, this was a moment of joy and vindication for the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. After being banned from making movies in 2010 for creating “propaganda against the state” and sentenced to six years in prison after protesting against the detention of two fellow filmmakers, Panahi has spent his life fighting to ensure that the Iranian peoples’ voices never die out. His new film, “It Was Just an Accident,” was shot without official permission from the Iranian authorities and is another scathing critique of the oppressive government. Following its world premiere at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the film was immediately lauded and praised as one of Panahi’s best works.
But Panahi’s triumph at Cannes didn’t come out of nowhere — it’s the culmination of a lifetime spent defying authoritarianism and championing the importance of artistic resistance. No matter how many times authorities try to silence Panahi, he finds new ways to resist the system and challenge the expectations of oppressed filmmakers. Panahi has been and continues to be an integral figure in the so-called “cinema of resistance,” and we need his voice now more than ever.
Looking back through Panahi’s work, it’s interesting to see how many of his films don’t feel like films. Rather, they feel like a documentation of the bleak, real existence many Iranians experience. His 2010 film, “Taxi,” (2015) shows Panahi posing as a taxi driver, driving throughout the streets of Tehran and interviewing passengers as they enter his car. There are only five camera angles in the entire film — the driver’s seat, the passenger seat, the backseat, a point-of-view shot from the car, and his niece’s camcorder — creating a sense of voyeurism as the audience looks in on these casual conversations. Viewers become flies on the wall. Panahi even manually adjusts the camera then and again, making this docufiction feel like a slice of reality that we’re simply watching in on. Long, continuous shots frame the movie and juxtapose the rapid, attention-grabbing editing that pervades modern films. You can feel time passing. You can hear the commotion of the streets, the ticking of the turn signal, the droning of the radio, and the sighs of the passengers.
Critics often describe Panahi’s style of filmmaking as an Iranian form of neorealism, or, in his own words, as capturing the “humanitarian aspects of things.” However, there’s a tension between the overtly expressed anger against Iranian societal restrictions. His “informal” and “realist” filmmaking clashes against the inherent anger and frustration within his films. There’s fury seething beneath every frame, permeating ever so slightly until the entire film is colored in furtive rage. It’s subtle, but omnipresent. Everyday conversations feel like a muffled scream.
Another topic Panahi dives into is the marketability of films, sparked when Panahi’s niece, Hana, starts recording her uncle for a short film assignment. Hana argues that simply documenting reality isn’t palatable to general audiences and that filmmakers must avoid sordid realism at all costs. Her list of what constitutes a marketable film includes the following: violence must never be shown, politics and economic issues must never be discussed, characters must embody only good qualities, one must use common sense to know how to censor oneself, and, finally, manufacture realism if you have to. The criteria she lists go directly against Panahi’s filmmaking, not only signifying the importance of Panahi’s artistic resistance, but also highlighting how ingrained Iranian censorship is — it’s saddening that a young girl has to think of the world in terms of what she’s allowed to show and what she must hide.
Panahi makes an effort to defy the confines of what’s expected from “marketable” films. Panahi made this movie in secret during his twenty-year filmmaking ban, and its artistic activism continues to influence modern cinema. There isn’t much “flair” in Panahi’s realist filmmaking, and there doesn’t need to be — resistance doesn’t always have to be loud, it just has to exist.
Jafar Panahi is only one piece of a widespread movement known as the cinema of resistance. One of the first protest films was Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), which dramatized a 1905 sailor’s mutiny as revolutionary propaganda, advocating that collective action among the masses is a powerful means for radical liberation. While the film isn’t a “protest film” in the modern sense, its unconventional filmmaking techniques and overt political messaging paved the way for film as social and political commentary. It set the precedent for subsequent protest films like the staunchly anti-war “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), and working class commentary underlying “Gold Diggers of 1993” (1993).
As long as film exists, so will the cinema of resistance. Unfortunately, so will the persecution of filmmakers brave enough to speak out against corruption. Countless artists like Panahi have faced the repercussions of protest art, with some facing even far greater consequences.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, a radical Italian poet and filmmaker, was consistently prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy, and censored for provocative films like “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” (1964) and “Salò” (1975). Far-right detractors ostracized his homosexuality and outspoken Marxist politics, and, in 1975, he was murdered by right-wing extremists.
Christian Poveda, a Spanish-French photojournalist and filmmaker, spent years in El Salvador documenting gang life. His film “La Vida Loca” (2008) exposed the country’s violent maras, and the same gang members that he documented ended up assassinating him in 2009.
Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, depicted the abuse of Muslim women and criticized religious fundamentalism in his short film “Submission” (2004). Facing a similar fate as Pasolini and Poveda, Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist extremist the same year as his film was released.
James Miller, a British documentary filmmaker, helped film “Death in Gaza” (2004), a documentary about Palestinian children under Israeli occupation. Israeli forces killed him in 2003, one year prior to the release of the film.
There’s a heavy cost to opposition. Filmmakers who challenge dominant ideologies face life-threatening consequences for their work, but that makes their art ever more valuable. They sacrifice everything to capture reality, forcing us to reckon with the world’s wrongness. Art isn’t trivial — it’s incredibly important in exposing reality and amplifying once-silenced voices. The cinema of resistance is out there. It’s now our responsibility to look and acknowledge our reality through the screen.
