He went to prison for directing, and kept making movies

TL;DR

Jafar Panahi kept making secret films despite imprisonment and a 20-year ban, using hidden cameras to craft humanizing, anti-propaganda cinema.

Key Points

• 1.Panahi faced severe legal punishment for filmmaking. He received a six-year prison sentence and 20-year ban on directing from the Iranian government for alleged propaganda against the regime, and faces a third sentence upon returning to Iran.
• 2.He developed an increasingly bold clandestine filmmaking style over three illegal films. Starting with apartment-bound 'This Is Not a Film' smuggled to Cannes, then 'Taxi' shot inside a car, then 'No Bears' filmed outdoors in rural areas — each film pushed further into public spaces.
• 3.His 2022 film 'No Bears' landed him in prison a second time. Shot in remote villages where lookouts could warn of police, it fictionalizes his own secret filmmaking process and earned him his second imprisonment.
• 4.His latest film 'It Was Just an Accident' is based on his prison experiences. The film follows a kidnapping revenge plot where an ex-prisoner doubts whether his captive really was his torturer, and was nominated for two Oscars.
• 5.'The Mirror' (his last legally made film) established his signature humanizing perspective. Shot entirely at a child's eye level so adult faces are rarely seen, it captures Tehran with documentary realism and portrays individuals rather than a homogeneous mass.
• 6.Panahi distinguishes himself from propaganda by refusing to flatten characters into binaries. He defines a political filmmaker as one who defends a specific ideology, making good and bad characters based on it — instead he exposes the dehumanizing systems of thinking behind oppression.
• 7.The film directly engages with the question of whether violence against oppressors is justifiable. Set against the backdrop of US and Israeli bombing of Iran during the video's editing — including a strike on a girls' school killing 100+ civilians — Panahi asks whether innocent people can ever be acceptable collateral damage.