This Is Not a Film

In 2010, Iranian film director Jafar Pahani was arrested by authorities for being critical of the government. While waiting on appeal, he was banned from making movies, writing screenplays for 20 years, and could not leave the country. Searching for an outlet, he invited a friend, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, to come over to his apartment and film him reading a screenplay he had already written, reasoning that acting and reading didn't fall under the sentence.

The result is This Is Not a Film, an interesting exercise in avoiding censorship. Though Pahani was trying to keep to the sentence, it was still an illegal enterprise, and was smuggled out of the country on a flashdrive inside a cake.

The result is an odd mixture of the banal daily activities of Pahani and an aborted attempt to read his screenplay, and ends with Pahani talking to a custodian. I'm not sure what I think about it.

It turns out I have seen one of Pahani's films--Offside, which I enjoyed a lot. His new screenplay, which he reads two scenes from, is about a girl who wants to attend art school but her parents, religious extremists, forbid it and lock her in her room, where she contemplates suicide. But Pahani gets choked up, and wonders, "If one can tell a film, should one make a film?" He then looks at scenes from his films, and realizes that telling is not enough--acting and location can direct films.

The rest of the film is Pahani puttering around his apartment, talking to his lawyer, dealing with a neighbor who wants to drop off their barking dog, and then interviewing a young man who is filling in as a custodian in the building. Outside it is Fireworks Night, which is some sort of holiday, and I think some kind of protest. The last shot is the custodian leaving the building, a conflagration in the street.

Given the limits of Pahani's sentence, this is a remarkable victory in the war against oppression, but I'm not sure it's a good movie. If this were just a guy going about his day we would be terribly bored, so the context of the film is everything. It held my interest for the 78-minute running time, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.