This Is Not a Film
aka In film nist First screened in April 2012 / Most recently screened and reviewed in October 2025
Directors: Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. Semi-documentary record of Jafar Panahi's state-mandated house arrest and prohibition from filmmaking. Cast: Jafar Panahi,
Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, voice of Rakhshan Beni-Etemad. Screenplay: Jafar Panahi.Twitter Capsule: (2012)
It isn't, quite, but it scores its points, uses offscreen space and sound smartly, and ends on its best sequence
Nothing but the facts: I started my third viewing this movie, but my first in quite a while, around 5:20pm in my downtown Chicago apartment. By 5:45, as the house-arrested Jafar Panahi starts using furniture and masking tape to conjure for us the film project he's currently forbidden from making, seven different helicopters, none of them recognizable as the usual rush-hour "traffic cams," were either pinned in place or circling over the Loop... and those are just the ones we could see from our windows. I paused around 6:00 to go pay more attention. I came back around 6:30, as the sky was noticeably darkening, both in my world and in Panahi's, and also figuratively in Panahi's, as colleagues are phoning him to say they can't figure out a reliable way to help.
On the soundtrack of This Is Not a Film, sunset-hour explosions get steadily louder and more frequent, pointedly unspecified as holiday celebrations (the not-a-film takes place on Fireworks Wednesday) or as civil disobedience or as artillery, outgoing or incoming, or as all three. Outside my window, now officially dark, the usual or maybe unusual evening profusion of sirens, and the steadily louder and sharper screeches of a table saw—either from the apartment across the street, which has been making repairs to an outdoor deck, or something else.
Inside the movie, Igi the iguana, beloved pet of the unseen granddaughter of Panahi, who oscillates between being agitted and charmed by the unflappable reptile, whose species has survived for, what, literal millennia? Igi looks at the camera at one point and says, "Ocean waves." (Okay, this is not a fact.)
At the end of the movie, the unforgettable and forbidden step into the streets. The flames, which might be bonfires, or firework launches gone wrong, or something else. After that, in my pitch-black living room, the closing text:
In September 2011, [co-director] Mojtaba Mirtahmasb was arrested along with five other Iranian filmmakers and charged with "collaborating with the BBC." He was released three months later. No trial date has been set and he remains in legal limbo and unable to work.
In December 2011, Jafar Panahi's final appeal was rejected and he can be taken to prison at any time.
In October 2012, Jafar Panahi and Iranian Human Rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh were awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament. Forbidden to leave the country, Jafar Panahi requested fellow director Costa-Gavras read the following statement on his behalf at the ceremony:
"Why do the governments, the almighty and powerful, become more intolerant every day? History is the narrative of the few, making the lives of the many miserable, while using the most unacceptable excuses: difference of sex, language, religion, or political ideas."
Film's over. It's 7:30pm. News outlets have declaimed an unusually early meteor shower in tonight's sky. I'm looking out the same apartment windows, with hope. I don't see anything in the dark outside, but I still hear the sirens, the saw, the helicopters. Grade:A–
(in April 2012: B)
Awards:
National Society of Film Critics: Best Experimental Film
