Taxi Film. Written and Directed by JafarPanahi. Jafar Panahi Film Productions, 2015

This remarkable film, covertly shot on the streets of Tehran as the director, violating house arrest, poses as a cabbie, will be of interest to those teaching courses on the Middle East, Iran, or the broader intersection of religion and politics. Turning state surveillance back on itself through the cab's hidden cameras, highlighting the underground art economy with a progression of dealers of bootlegged films and music, and ridiculing notions of governmental control over religion by contrasting official theology with the popular practice, Panahi's film also focuses on the desire to create (he encounters two film students) in resistance to a system of censorship that is manifest in multiple ways, including the constraints of filming the project and in a schoolgirl's recitation of her teacher's list of those elements prohibited in her class project, most notably the “vulgar realism” of which Panahi has been accused. Although there is plenty of such realism in the film, which offers ceaseless footage of the streets of Tehran, the plot is a tightly choreographed series of pick-ups and drop-offs, fleeting encounters stitched together by themes of kindness and creativity flourishing despite and in reaction to state violence. One of the first characters we meet is a mugger who argues that no one should rob from the poor. Later, a childhood friend of Panahi explains why he did not report an assault and robbery of which he was a victim. And in the final scene, what looks at first like a robbery of Panahi's cab is revealed to be a strike by agents of the government, who are recorded declaring that they will eventually get the director. This is fiction both mirroring and driving reality. When a lawyer—in the process of being barred from practice, another instance of censorship—lays a rose on the dashboard as an offering to the camera and Panahi's project, it highlights the frame of the cinema screen, putting the audience in a more intimate relationship with the images and events before us. Indeed, this film is also an offering, lovingly crafted and urgent in its message

Aesthetics · Art · Creativity · Film director · Flourishing · Kindness · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Realism · Sociology · Visual arts · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Psychology · Social Psychology · Turkey's Politics and Society