This man, who has been silenced, now finds things in the films he did not plan. In the first, the little girl who is playing his heroine, gets fed up with the process, tears off the cast she's wearing for the scene and stalks out of camera range. "I'm not acting anymore!" she announces. The second is a drama about the difficulties of a group of women who attempt to move about the city without male companions (chaperones?). The third is about a large, stolid man who loses patience with himself. The actor is in fact schizophrenic (which the film doesn't mention). He cannot take direction, but spontaneously he makes a gesture with his hands that expresses enormous frustration.
I've seen these films, and they are very good. They've won awards at many major festivals: Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and so on. I realize my description doesn't begin to evoke the experience for you. That is precisely Panahi's point. He demonstrates it in an agonizing scene where he begins to tell his friend the story of his banned film and uses tape on the carpet to mark out the floor plan of his heroine's room. (She has been accepted by a university but forbidden by her father to attend, and locked in her room). He grows frustrated and tears up the tape.
Things happen. Carry-out food arrives. A neighbor drops off her dog for Panahi to watch, but the dog freaks out at the sight of the iguana. He watches the news on TV. It is Fireworks Wednesday, marking the Persian New Year, and in the evening, the city by tradition will be crowned by fireworks. Ahmadinejad has banned fireworks, murmuring darkly that they are in violation of Islamic law. The film never says the Islamic Republic shows great insecurity in the face of anything it doesn't control. It doesn't have to. I would like to show "This Is Not a Film" to those in the United States who are in favor of a close union of church and state.
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