Jafar Panahi
Banned from filmmaking by the Iranian state in 2010, he kept making films anyway: in his flat, in a car, on a phone. This Is Not a Film and Taxi turn censorship itself into both subject and method.
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The Year of the Everlasting Storm
Featuring seven stories from seven auteurs from around the world, the film chronicles this unprecedented moment in time, and is a true love letter to the power of cinema and its storytellers.
Defining films
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Both are filmmakers working under constraint, Sissako in occupied Mali, Panahi in censored Iran, finding poetry in political impossibility.
Both strip cinema to its essence, minimal plot, maximum observation, the camera as witness to solitude and displacement.
Both international festival circuit darlings whose work circulates through Cannes and Venice, cinema as survival when state machinery closes in.
Post-authoritarian filmmakers reclaiming cinema as personal expression, Almodóvar after Franco, Panahi after the Revolution's tightening grip.
In their own words
Working with Kiarostami was like going to a private film school. On Through the Olive Trees I really understood what filmmaking was about.
Working with Kiarostami was like going to a private film school. It was on Through the Olive Trees that I really understood what filmmaking was about.
I started working as an assistant with him on films like Where is the Friend's House? and And Life Goes On, and I learned many things from him that I applied to my own films.
