Iranian director discusses resistance, creative vision

Jafar Panahi speaks at a press conference for his gala presentation film "It Was Just an Accident" at the Busan Cinema Center in Haeundae-gu, Busan, Thursday. (Yonhap)
Jafar Panahi speaks at a press conference for his gala presentation film "It Was Just an Accident" at the Busan Cinema Center in Haeundae-gu, Busan, Thursday. (Yonhap)

BUSAN — "I consider myself a social filmmaker."

Jafar Panahi laid that down straight Thursday morning, speaking at a press conference held at the Busan Cinema Center. Just hours earlier, France had announced its selection of Panahi's Palme d'Or winner "It Was Just an Accident" as the country's Oscar submission. In Busan, he's here for his Asian filmmaker of the year award, a gala screening of "It Was Just an Accident," plus a retrospective threading through his three decades of defiant filmmaking.

The director's connection to the city runs deep. He attended BIFF's inaugural edition in 1996 with "The White Balloon." That first visit left an impression. "The city was so beautiful, vivid. The feeling was very warm," he said, speaking in Farsi interpreted into English. "Audiences and filmmakers during that time, they were very close together. They could talk to each other." After returning home, he wrote an article predicting BIFF would become one of the world's great festivals. He would return six times over the years.

Between that first visit and now stretches a career marked by extraordinary courage. After two decades of films that put Iran's social contradictions under the microscope, authorities banned him from filmmaking in 2010. They threw him in prison, placed him under house arrest and seized his passport. The charges: propaganda against the regime.

The experience, Panahi says, transformed his approach to cinema. "I'd made films for 20 years, but before that I'd never appeared in front of my own camera," he said. Government restrictions forced him to turn the lens inward. "I went inside myself. Looking at my own self, where all my ideas were coming from."

This introspection led to "This Is Not a Film" (2011), shot secretly inside his apartment. The title itself reads as a defiant statement. Authorities told him he couldn't make films; he responded by making one anyway, right there in his living room. A flash drive hidden inside a birthday cake smuggled it out of the country. The documentary screened in Busan as part of this year's retrospective.

"What else can I do? I can't do anything but filmmaking," Panahi says. "Maybe taxi driver?" That thought experiment became his next film, "Taxi," shot entirely from the driver's seat as he ferried passengers around Tehran. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2015.

When asked about the source of his strength through these ordeals, Panahi's answer came with perfect comedic timing: "I get my power from my wife. Because I'm incapable of doing anything else. If I don't make films, my wife will divorce me."

But beneath the joke lay a deeper truth about creative compulsion. "The happiest moment is when I'm making a film. The hardest is when I'm sitting and thinking what can I do," he says. "This isn't a slogan. Any filmmaker when he's making a film is alive."

His latest, "It Was Just an Accident," draws from his 2022 imprisonment at Evin Prison, Iran's most notorious penitentiary, located in Tehran. The film follows a group of former political prisoners who believe they've identified their torturer by the sound of his boots. But they can't be certain -- they were all blindfolded.

After screening at the festival, the film opens in Korean theaters on Oct. 2, among the first in the world. "I hope many come to see it," Panahi said, promising, "I'm sure audiences won't regret it."

True to his instincts as a social filmmaker, Panahi used his platform to advocate systemic change to the festival circuit operations. The Academy Awards, he noted, require government permission for submissions from each country. "This is a problem in authoritarian countries like Iran. Independent filmmakers should find a way together so they don't face this kind of problem." It was possible to submit "It Was Just an Accident" because it was co-produced with France.

Asked about advice for young filmmakers facing their own challenges, Panahi got philosophical. "Every country has its own problems. Economic problems, physical problems. But the filmmaker has the duty to find a way to make whatever he wishes."

He outlined his theory of cinema's two paths. "One type -- you run after the audience, thinking what they want, trying to cater to taste. Ninety-five percent of films fit this category." Then there's the other kind. "The filmmaker says: I see things like this. If you want to understand, come after me and follow how I see the world."

Neither is inherently better, he stressed. Cinema needs both. "But a filmmaker should choose. The very first step -- you need to understand yourself."

"No one can ever stop filmmaking," he said. "Filmmakers will always find a way."


moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com