“A testament to its director’s lively, ungovernable storytelling imagination” – The Playlist
Jafar Panahi (APSA Academy Member and former Jury Member) has been working in secret for the last half-decade. Banned from filmmaking for 20 years by the Iranian authorities, he has since waged a one-man campaign of clandestine cinematic resistance.
Tehran Taxi is the third in his series of surreptitious projects, a playfully defiant film that won Golden Bear for Best Film at this year’s Berlinale. Posing as a cab driver, Panahi used a dashboard-mounted camera to turn his vehicle into a mobile film studio. Driving the streets of Tehran while his passengers debate, haggle and offer nuggets of street wisdom, he pieces together a series of vignettes that form a mischievous broadside against contemporary Iranian society.
