Taxi Teheran

The career of the highly acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been dominated by censorship, bans, arrests and imprisonment. The Iranian government is keen to silence Panahi, but has not succeeded in doing so. He shrugged off a twenty-year film ban imposed in 2010: “No one can stop me from making films – it is precisely when I am pushed into a corner that the urge to create turns into an absolute necessity within me.” And so, since then, he has made a whole series of highly acclaimed films, including Taxi Tehran in 2015, a film with an anonymous cast (after all, it can be dangerous to appear in a Panahi film), for which he was awarded the Golden Bear, amongst other honours, at the recent Berlin Film Festival.

The premise is as simple as it is effective: a taxi drives through the streets of Tehran, and the conversations with the passengers paint a realistic picture of everyday life in the Iranian capital. Panahi himself plays the taxi driver.