Newsmaker: Jafar Panahi

And the winner is... Jafar Panahi.

Simply by making a film and getting it past the Iranian authorities to screen at the 65th Berlin film festival, the 54-year-old Iranian filmmaker Panahi had already claimed his biggest prize. The Golden Bear for the best film at Berlin is just the icing on the cake.

Taxi is the third film that Panahi has made since being sentenced to six years in jail, given a 20-year ban from making or writing films or giving interviews to the press.

On 20 December, 2010, the Iranian Revolutionary Court convicted Panahi for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic”. The sentence has never actually been implemented.

Panahi lives under a legal cloud where at any given moment the authorities could swoop in and imprison him. He makes films in secret and sneaks them out of the country, the first time for 2011's This Is Not a Film, which played at the Cannes Film Festival, on a USB stick hidden in a cake. The acclaimed film went on to win the Murh AsiaAfrica Documentary 2011 prize at the Dubai International Film Festival.

After winning the Golden Bear in Berlin this week, Panahi pleaded with the Iranian authorities to allow Taxi to be screened in Iran, stating: "No prize is worth as much as my compatriots being allowed to see the film."

The irony is that the statement was delivered in an interview with Iranian television, with the state seemingly happy to ignore its own judicial sentence. “I’m really happy for me and Iranian cinema,” said Panahi. “The people in power accuse us of making films for foreign film festivals. They hide behind political walls and don’t say that our films are never authorised for screening in Iranian cinemas.”

The Iranian government responded in a Kafkaesque manner that celebrated the win, condemned Panahi for making a film without permission and the Berlin film festival for screening the film, then seemed to shrug its collective shoulders.

Hojjatollah Ayyubi, the spokesman for the Iranian government's film body, the Iran Cinema Organisation, said: "I regret that you [the Berlin film festival] wish to drive everybody in a taxi of new misunderstandings about the Iranian people by screening a film by a director who has been banned by law from making films. But nevertheless, he has done exactly that. I am delighted to announce that the director of Taxi continues to drive in the fast lane of his life, freely enjoying all its blessings." Should Ayyubi retire from politics, a career in stand-up comedy surely awaits.

The indication from watching Taxi is that the director has a greater sense of freedom than he's felt since his conviction. The film sees Panahi play himself, or a version of himself, as he drives a Taxi through Tehran's streets. It's clear he's not under house arrest, as had been widely reported, and he released a statement accompanying the film to confirm that he's free to move about Tehran, but has no passport.

He picks up passengers: a street mugger, a teacher, a pirate-DVD salesman, two old ladies with goldfish, a wife and her husband injured in a bike accident, a florist and the director’s niece, who picked up the Golden Bear in her uncle’s absence in Berlin. The discussions range from whether taxi drivers are fair game to steal from, films that should be watched and how secure a wife is should her husband die unexpectedly to the arrest and detainment of the female volleyball fan Ghoncheh Ghavami.

He does this all with a smirk and a penchant for refusing to take money from his customers – he doesn’t often get them to their destinations, so it seems a fair trade.

Contrast the comedy of Taxi to the sombre mood of This Is Not a Film, in which Panahi is filmed by his co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb waiting for the result of the appeal against his sentence, fearing that every sound of a firework in the sky is a gunshot, or his 2013 film Closed Curtain, which played in competition in Berlin and was shot secretly at Panahi's beachfront villa on the Caspian Sea, starting as a story of a writer in hiding, before seeing Panahi and his film crew enter the frame to reveal that they're making a film.

The lightheartedness and confidence of Taxi is closer to the style and tone of films he made earlier in his career.

Born in Mianeh on July 11, 1960, Panahi grew up under the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He came from a working-class background – his father was a house painter – with two brothers and four sisters, who he claims encouraged his love of cinema. Forbidden from leaving the house, the sisters would ask Panahi to re-enact scenes he saw in movies for them. Panahi then began experimenting with stills and movie cameras, making short films at the Kanoon (the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults).

At the age of 20, following the Iranian Revolution and the installation of the populist theocracy of Ayatollah Khomeini, Panahi was conscripted into the army and served in the Iran-Iraq War. In 1981, he was captured by Kurdish rebels and held captive for 76 days. He worked as an army cinematographer and shot a documentary about the war.

Following his military service, he enrolled in the College of Cinema and TV in Tehran, where he studied filmmaking. He began making short documentaries for television.

In 1992, he began making short fiction films. His film The Friend was a homage to the Iranian new-wave director Abbas Kiarostami. Emboldened by the positive reception to his short films, he called Kiarostami asking for a job. Kiarostami hired Panahi as his assistant director for the film Through the Olive Trees.

It was while driving to the set everyday that Panahi told Kiarostami about an idea for a short film. Kiarostami encouraged him to make a feature film and said he would write it, which involved an unusual process of Kiarostami talking the script in the car while Panahi tape-recorded and then wrote down his words. In 1994, Panahi made his debut feature film, The White Balloon, about a plucky young girl who wants to buy a lucky goldfish for an upcoming New Year celebration. The film was shown at Cannes, where it won the Caméra d'Or, the prize for the best first feature film.

Panahi stood out among Iranian directors for his desire to put women at the forefront of his films. Four of the five films he made before his conviction had female leads.

His one early film with a male protagonist was another script by Kiarostami, Crimson Gold (2003), which follows the events that drive a pizza-delivery man to try to rob a jewellery store. It won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes.

Yet as his career skyrocketed, he began to fall foul of the authorities – and not just in Iran, where each of his films made since The Circle in 2000 have been banned.

In April 2001, on his way from Hong Kong to the Buenos Aires International Film Festival of Independent Cinema, Panahi was arrested at JFK International Airport in New York for not possessing the requisite transit visa. The director refused to be fingerprinted and was arrested, bound and put on a plane that took him back to Hong Kong.

In 2003, he was arrested and encouraged to leave Iran. In July 2009, he was arrested near the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan, a student shot in the head during the 2009 Iranian elections. Her death became an iconic part of the Green Revolution, in opposition to the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In March 2010, it was reported that Panahi was arrested because he tried to make a documentary about the disputed election.

A huge international outcry followed his arrest and subsequent sentencing. After he was unable to take his place on the jury at the Berlin film festival in 2011, during which Isabella Rossellini condemned the Iranian regime when she read aloud an emotional letter from Panahi, film festivals began keeping one chair empty at every screening for him. He wrote about his arrest and ban from films. It was displayed on film festival websites, including Abu Dhabi Film Festival’s.

Despite the upheavals and bans, Panahi has shown tremendous strength of character. There’s a feeling it’s only by making high-profile films that he can keep himself in the international limelight and maintains his freedom.

In a statement in the Berlin film festival catalogue, Panahi said: “I can’t do anything else but make films. Cinema is my expression and my meaning in life. Nothing can prevent me from making films.”

weekend@thenational.ae