Taxi Tehran

Following the audacious This Is Not a Film (2011) and the introspective Closed Curtain (2013), dissident Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi assumes the guise of a taxi driver in his latest bid to defy the government ban on cinematic activity. Filmed by a dashboard camera and blurring the line between improv and actuality, Panahi and his passengers discuss everything from video piracy, creative integrity, sharia law, the status of women and transgression in a repressive society. But, while the discussions sometimes become heated, Panahi keeps the mood light, particularly when chatting to a DVD bootlegger (who occasionally supplies him with smuggled titles from the West) and with his perky ten-year-old niece, Hana Saeidi, whose quaint sense of right and wrong leads her to become a key player in a short film she has to make for school. Throughout, Panahi stresses the artist's right to speak his mind and make a living, and urges ordinary citizens to use their voices (on social media and elsewhere) to bring about change within the Islamic Republic. It's an ambitious agenda and demonstrates that Panahi has no intention of being silenced.