This is Not a Film

Tehran, during the 2011 Iranian New Year. Panahi sits in his apartment, eating, watching the news, waiting to hear from his lawyer – who has filed an appeal against the government’s 20-year ban on his filmmaking. He’s tired of this involuntary inactivity. Bored, he begins to document his everyday life – reaching for his camera as an act of resistance. When his friend and colleague, the renowned documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, drops by, the pair discuss the precarious status of cinema in Iran. Then Panahi begins to move the furniture and mark the floor up with packing tape. He introduces a scene from a script the censorship authorities rejected: with a bit of imagination, we see a film that should not exist take shape.