This Is Not a Film Analysis

This Is Not a Film (2011)

Co-directed, Edited and Produced by: Jafar Panahi

This film was smuggled out of Iran to Cannes, in a flash drive inside a cake - because Jafar Panahi was banned for 20 years, from making films, writing screenplays, giving interviews and going abroad - this is like death penalty to a filmmaker - and in a protest to that, he shot a film at his home, about the ban, he narrates a few scenes from his screenplay and talks about how vastly different it is to make a film than to narrate a scene, reflecting on the nature of filmmaking. They apparently have to submit the screenplay to the government and take approval, and his films mostly being anti-authority have always gotten him into trouble. 

He has experienced lockdown, isolation and how it feels to be confined and oppressed as an artist way before the world. Often people talk about need of life experiences to be able to write stories - but I think that isolation and loneliness are never any lesser of life experiences either. There's a lot of internal angst, and for artists - not being able to create art, or even worse - being able to create and yet not creating anything can lead to a lot of internal angst - which in itself can be used as an inspiration to create something. 

The choice of shots to capture are interesting - they are an intimate portrayal of his life - whether it's the crocodile pet crawling on him while he is working, his phone calls during breakfast, and his conversations with his friend at the end - the form here is radical - it's in between a vlog, an interview and a documentary. Do we have to name it anyway? We could just call it a film, in spite of the makers telling us otherwise. Here, the context and the external story of the film being smuggled in a cake - work as the promotional material for the film, they do what a trailer would've done otherwise.