Jafar Panahi doesn't want to be called a hero. He just wants to make films

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NEW YORK (AP) — The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned, banned from traveling, put under house arrest and ordered to stop making films for 20 years. And, yet, Panahi has continually made films. Many of them rank among the greatest of the century.

Most would call that courageous. Not Panahi.

“My problem was that I was told not to make films. I had to make films. It’s very simple,” Panahi says. “I can come and claim I make things for my masses, for my people, for my country. No, I’m just looking for ways to make films.

“I looked for solutions and I found them.”

And, since he was first jailed in 2009, Panahi has found some extraordinary solutions. He made “Taxi” (2015) largely inside a car, serving as driver himself. “This Is Not a Film” (2011), he made in his living room, on an iPhone.

To evade authorities, the 65-year-old Panahi has often had to direct scenes remotely, or switch locations on a near-daily basis. His latest, “It Was Just an Accident,” was made clandestinely in Iran following a seven-month stint in prison that only ended in 2023 once Panahi went on a hunger strike. He made the movie, opening in the U.S. this week, inspired by the stories his fellow prisoners told.

In “It Was Just an Accident,” an anguished revenge thriller, a former prisoner spots in Tehran the man he thinks was his abusive interrogator in jail. But because he was blindfolded during interrogations — like Panahi, himself, was — he’s not sure. With the man gagged and bound in the back of his van, he drives to other former prisoners, and they debate what to do.

“At the end of the day, I was a special person there,” Panahi, in a recent interview in Manhattan, said through an interpreter of his time in Evin Prison. “There were people there who would go on hunger strikes for 20 or 30 days and no one would hear about it. If I didn’t eat for two days, the entire world would find out.”

Panahi has long been one of the most acclaimed filmmakers in movies, but he’s been absent from the world stage for more than 15 years. In that time, film festivals have sometimes reserved an open seat for him, with a “Jafar Panahi” placard.

After being released in 2023, Panahi’s travel ban was lifted. He still made “It Was Just an Accident” underground, refusing to request government approval for his script. In one instance, during a night shoot when Panahi wasn’t present, his crew was detained by police.

But for the first time in nearly two decades, Panahi is able to travel with his film. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, he won the Palme d’Or. Accepting the prize on stage, he implored: “No one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do or what we should not do. The cinema is a society.”

With heightened concerns over censorship in other countries, Panahi has been given a hero’s welcome abroad. At the New York Film Festival, where his arrival was delayed by visa complications due to the travel ban implemented in June for visitors from 12 countries, Martin Scorsese hailed Panahi as one of the most important filmmakers working.

Yet Panahi doesn’t consider himself a hero, and dislikes being labeled a political filmmaker. For him, it’s more simple.

“In cinema, it’s typical for people to constantly be looking for reasons not to work,” Panahi says. “I kept saying: I am a filmmaker. I have to make films. And it is my right to make films.”

Panahi, like other filmmakers working under authoritarian regimes, has tested Oscar regulations. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences mandates that all nominees for best international film be submitted by a country. As expected, Iran didn’t select “It Was Just an Accident.” Instead, France made Panahi’s film, which was co-produced in France, its submission.

Panahi, though, would rather see governments taken out of the process entirely.

“If we want to send a film to Cannes or Venice or elsewhere, we don’t have an issue,” he says. “But as soon as we’re talking about the Oscars, we have to go and beg our governments.”

Still, Panahi has refused to flee Iran. He loves his country, he says, and knows emigrant life isn’t for him. His friend and countryman, Mohammad Rasoulof last year dramatically fled Iran on foot in order to resettle in Germany and premiere “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in Cannes. But Panahi returned to Iran the day after winning the Palme.

“It made many people happy but it also made the government officials unhappy,” says Panahi. “State officials used the same formula as before and considered us spies for the CIA and Israel. On the other hand, many people, especially the families of political prisoners and independent filmmakers, were very happy I returned.”

Following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022, a wave of protests spread against the Iran's mandatory hijab laws and treatment of women. Panahi was imprisoned at the time of the protests but took great inspiration from them. Several female actors in “It Was Just an Accident” appear in the film without hijabs.

“I really don’t want to give morality lessons. I want to cause and create questions,” Panahi says. “I want to ask what happens in the future, and encourage people to think if we will respond to violence with violence.”

Panahi first looked through a camera at age 10. He became fascinated with the ability to capture life around him, and saved up to buy his first camera. Though some of his friends favored landscapes, he preferred photographing people. “I found myself shooting the streets,” he recalls.

In the decades since, nothing has really changed for Panahi.

“I haven’t created the darkness. The darkness is there and the problem is with the people who created the darkness,” says Panahi. “I’m just showing the reality.”

At the New York Film Festival, Panahi remembered something his father told him when he was a child that's stuck with him ever since: “You're not allowed to bow to anyone other than God.”