On July 11, the very same day he turned 64, Iranian master Jafar Panahi walked into the garden of Common Ground cafe in Yerevan, greeted with a standing ovation, attending his first public talk in almost 15 years within the frames of GAIFF 2024. At the closing ceremony of the festival he will be fittingly awarded with the festival's prestigious Parajanov’s Thaler.
You could probably bet that some people there had never even seen a Panahi film, or maybe one or two, but still his name inspires instant admiration. The aura around him is one of a heroic figure and a true artist, who creates no matter what — no jail sentence, no house arrest are sufficient enough reasons for him to just pipe down. And this is where the parallels with Sergei Parajanov come in, despite their completely different cinematic sensibilities. For instance, Panahi, during the rendez-vous, described himself as “a social filmmaker”: Parajanov would probably walk on hot coal before associating himself with any specific social cause or anything remotely political.
Panahi’s cinema is the fascinating marriage of complete freedom in form and the constant addressing of issues related to contradictions in post-Revolutionary Iran. Yet, where the two masters do meet is their shared understanding of an artist's fate and mission. In one of many letters from prison addressed to his ex-wife Svetlana, Parajanov casually writes: “I know everything that’s going on and how much grief I’ve caused you. But it’s inevitable, because I’ve realized that this is me.” Most of Panahi’s replies to questions at Common Ground basically amounted to the same idea: it’s just me, I can’t help it. “Why do you continue to make films in Iran?”, “Why won’t you leave Iran?”, “How do you manage to do it under such conditions?,” all warranted very basic replies: “I love Iran, I can’t imagine living anywhere else”, “We just took a camera and made the film on a low budget. It doesn’t have to be a professional camera”, and, referring to his 2015 film Taxi: “I couldn’t make films, so I thought I could be a taxi driver, but the filmmaker in me didn’t stay still, so I just put a camera in the corner of the taxi.”
One student, seeking guidance, asked for advice on how to make his future films more believable and more realistic, akin to the authentic environments we see in Panahi films. And Panahi’s detailed response could be summarized in his initial suggestion that “your films do not have to be realistic, they have to be you.” Likewise, Panahi’s mission is not his famous opposition to a repressive political system, that’s just an inevitable side-effect. His true calling is to be himself and express himself as deeply as possible in a never-ending search. And when this calling that is true for any artist crashes into a wall of the harshest of circumstances such as his or Parajanov’s, it becomes more clear and something that any sane person would strive for.
As a result, Panahi’s life and career, although tough, extremely heartbreaking to follow and at times quite dangerous, have unraveled in the only way they could have unraveled just as in Parajanov’s case, because he just couldn’t help it. And even though this question wasn’t asked, you can bet he would say he wouldn’t have it any other way if it meant going against himself and laying low for a while. This is artistic bravery at its finest and a sure path to becoming one of the most accomplished authors of modern cinema, and indeed, a legend.
Artur Vardikyan
You can check out Jafar Panahi’s latest film, the Venice IFF Special Jury prize winning No Bears (Iran, 2022) on 14-7 at 18:30 at the Grand Hall of House of Cinema.