Event

This is Not a Film

APRIL 13 through 19, FRIDAY through THURSDAY AT 7 & 9PM
Seattle Premiere!
This is Not a Film
(Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Jafar Panahi, 2010, Iran, Blu-ray, 75 min) Smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive hidden inside a cake, This is Not a Film protests its nature for good reason. At the onset of this project, filmmaker Jafar Panahi was faced with a six-year jail sentence and a twenty-year ban from filmmaking. Calling on a friend and fellow filmmaker, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Panahi suggests that reading a script on camera would not count as "making a film." Using masking tape to delineate the set on his living room floor, Panahi attempts to "tell" his film. Eventually abandoning this project, the film shifts to capture Panahi's house arrest, his calls to his lawyer and the slow deliberate steps of his pet iguana. The film experiments with the boundaries of the role of director, but also serves as a plea to the international film community. Knowing now that his sentence was upheld, and that Mirtahmasb has also been arrested, this documentary serves as a tragic warning against censorship.

"Equally at home with fiction and non-fiction genres and a filmmaker consistently interested in blurring those demarcations, Panahi's latest effort has a deceptively unstructured and spontaneous quality underpinned by a clear intellectual agenda." Rose Capp, The Vine