Opening Night Film
Directed by Jafar Panahi | Iran | Persian w/ English subtitles | 2015 | Fiction/Documentary | 82 mins
Sponsors: 05401, Champlain College and Green Cab VT
Film Source: Kino Lorber
Followed by Opening Night Party in the Lake Lobby and announcement of VT filmmakers Awards
Call it guerilla cinema, Iranian neorealism or an act of political dissent. But whatever the label, Jafar Panahi’s Taxi is simply great filmmaking in the face of considerable adversity. Since 2010, Panahi has been banned by the Iranian government from making movies. But that hasn’t stopped him from surreptitiously turning out the autobiographical This Is Not a Film (which was smuggled from Iran to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival in a flash drive hidden in a birthday cake and was also screened at VTIFF 2013) and the similarly self-reflexive Closed Curtain. Like fellow Iranian Abbas Kiarostami’s 2002 film Ten, Taxi is set entirely within the confines of an automobile. Panahi himself is at the wheel, with a dashboard camera capturing his interactions with a variety of passengers – including a bootlegger of American videos and Panahi’s precocious niece, who longs to make a “distributable” film. Like the earlier Kiarostami film, Panahi’s movie deals with the subjugation of women in Iranian society, but it also overtly addresses issues of state censorship and Iran’s disturbing propensity for meting out capital punishment for minor offenses. Taxi is bold, uncompromising cinema, which should on no account be missed.
For a comprehensive review of the film by A. O. Scott in the New York Times, CLICK HERE