page_title: Jafar Panahi
section_title: Style
hierarchical_section_title: Jafar Panahi / Style
caption_attribution_description: 1SUR - 2007 English: The iranian filmmaker member of the jury of the first edition Español: El realizador iraní miembro del jurado de la primera edición
context_page_description: Jafar Panâhi is an Iranian film director, screenwriter, and film editor, commonly associated with the Iranian New Wave film movement. After several years of making short films and working as an assistant director for fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi achieved international recognition with his feature film debut, The White Balloon. The film won the Caméra d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, the first major award an Iranian film won at Cannes.
  Panahi was quickly recognized as one of Iran's most influential filmmakers. His films were often banned in Iran, but he continued to receive international acclaim from film theorists and critics and won numerous awards, including the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival for The Mirror, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for The Circle, and the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Offside. His films are known for their humanistic perspective on life in Iran, often focusing on the hardships of children, the impoverished, and women. Hamid Dabashi has written, "Panahi does not do as he is told—in fact he has made a successful career in not doing as he is told."
context_section_description: Panahi's style is often described as an Iranian form of neorealism. Jake Wilson describes his films as connected by a "tension between documentary immediacy and a set of strictly defined formal parameters" in addition to "overtly expressed anger at the restrictions that Iranian society imposes".
  Panahi differs from his fellow realist filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami in the explicitness of his social critique. Stephen Teo writes that
  "Panahi's films redefine the humanitarian themes of contemporary Iranian cinema, firstly, by treating the problems of women in modern Iran, and secondly, by depicting human characters as 'non-specific persons'—more like figures who nevertheless remain full-blooded characters, holding on to the viewer's attention and gripping the senses. Like the best Iranian directors who have won acclaim on the world stage, Panahi evokes humanitarianism in an unsentimental, realistic fashion, without necessarily overriding political and social messages. In essence, this has come to define the particular aesthetic of Iranian cinema. So powerful is this sensibility that we seem to have no other mode of looking at Iranian cinema other than to equate it with a universal concept of humanitarianism."
  Panahi says his style can be described as "humanitarian events interpreted in a poetic and artistic way". "In a world where films are made with millions of dollars, we made a film about a little girl who wants to buy a fish for less than a dollar [The White Balloon]—this is what we're trying to show", he said. Panahi has said that "in all of my films, you never see an evil character, male or female. I believe everyone is a good person."
  In an interview with Anthony Kaufman, Panahi said: "I was very conscious of not trying to play with people's emotions; we were not trying to create tear-jerking scenes. So it engages people's intellectual side. But this is with assistance from the emotional aspect and a combination of the two."
  Hamid Dabashi has called Panahi the least self-conscious filmmaker in the history of Iranian film and said that his films represent a post-revolutionary Iranian outlook on itself, calling Crimson Gold not just a history of a failed jewellery robbery "but also [a history] of recent Iranian history, the history of the failed Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war in particular."
  Dabashi praises Panahi's restrained depiction of violence, saying that his "manner of showing violence without showing who has perpetrated it has now become a trademark of Panahi's cinema." Dabashi specifically cites Razieh's brother in The White Balloon as clearly having been beaten in one scene, but only being given hints of the violence of Razieh's father from off screen. In The Circle Nargress has been beaten but we are never told why or by whom. Dabashi writes, "violence in Panahi's cinema is like a phantom: you see through it, but it lacks a source or physical presence—who has perpetrated it is made intentionally amorphous. The result is a sense of fear and anxiety that lurks in every frame of his film, but it is a fear without an identifiable referent."
  Some Iranians have criticized his work, claiming that his films "don't draw a realistic picture of Iran, or that the difficulties encountered by women in [his] films apply to only a certain class of women."
caption: Panahi at Cines del Sur in 2007
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