Jafar Panahi is arguably the most relevant Iranian filmmaker since Abbas Kiarostami. Fascinatingly, Panahi was his pupil and an assistant director for the legendary director in Through the Olive Tree, the final act of the Koker trilogy, alongside Where Is the Friend’s House and And Life Goes On. Despite the international acclaim for Panahi’s films, another crucial fact to understand his work is his relationship to the Iranian regime. Since the early 2000s, Panahi has been prevented from leaving the country, especially to attend international events. Hence, in 2010, alongside another prominent Iranian filmmaker, Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig), they got a six-year jail sentence for propaganda against the Islamic Republic. Thus, Panahi has been in and out of prison since the early 2010s, resulting in shooting films secretly and world premieres without his presence. In the 2021 short film Life, Panahi takes a look at his family during his imprisonment and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Life is a part of the 2021 anthology film The Year of the Everlasting Storm, which contains Shorts by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Recall His Past Lives), Malik Vitthal (Imperial Dreams), Anthony Chen (The Breaking Ice), Panahi, Laura Poitras (Citizenfour), Domingo Sotomayor (Tardes para Morir Joven), and David Lowery (The Green Knight). Each of these household names approaches the pandemic under its own eyes. In Terror Contagion by Poitras, she acknowledges a theme present in her work, cybersecurity, while discussing the pandemic. Therefore, the Iranian legend does something similar. Reminiscent of another pandemic short in his filmography, Hidden, Panahi uses the lockdown time to reflect on history. In Hidden, it is a search for a voice prohibited from singing. Life is about his voice, prohibited from shooting. In the version released by NEON on YouTube, a preparation for It Was Just An Accident, his Palme d’Or winner, there is a short excerpt of Panahi’s conversation with Martin Scorsese at this year’s New York Film Festival. Panahi jokes that despite the shock of the prohibition of filming for twenty years, he couldn’t stop due to his clumsiness. Yet, his filmmaking ability brings fascination into a film about his ninety-year-old mother and his iguana, Igi.
Right into the first minutes of Life, the Iranian director establishes an unspoken parallel between lockdown and his prison. Exactly like people cannot leave their homes, he cannot leave Iran. For the eyes of the regime, he is an enemy. Even after the international success of It Was Just an Accident, the Iranian court condemned him to a year of imprisonment and a travel ban for propaganda. However, unlike his mate Rasoulof, who fled Iran and gathered an exile visa to live in Germany, Panahi wants to stay in his home. The constant conversation of this short film is about his mother’s fear of passing away from COVID and never seeing her grandchildren again. She is afraid of never seeing their faces in person again. Even if underlying it, Panahi feels the same. Prison robs him of his time, resulting in clandestine filming and bittersweet conversations on screen. The FaceTime calls between his mother and his daughter, Solmaz, hold an ultimate rebellious sentiment of breaking lockdown to see her granddaughter. Hence, Panahi has inherited it from her; he holds the strength of his mother to question the status quo and demand her wishes.
Furthermore, the film has a melancholy that reflects the ongoing situation in Panahi’s reality. His mother’s visitation is a point of joy in a bland and harsh situation. Still, the director attempts to observe beauty in the world surrounding him. In the first sequence, while shooting his yard, we see an egg hatching. In the end, even in the restrained space of his yard, nature is blooming. There’s beauty flourishing among the darkness of the health crisis that impacted the world and terrifies his mother, who wishes dearly to visit her grandchildren before passing. Panahi captures her fears in a scene where she divides her inheritance. All of her gold is in a cloth, which she opens up and divides, citing the name of the women in the family. Each conversation with her mother symbolizes the contrast between the past and the absence of the idea of the future, similar to the sentiment of a prisoner.
Thus, in his contribution to The Year of the Everlasting Storm, even if released in a different context, Panahi approaches the difficulties of working as a filmmaker in Iran. Yet, he observes the glimpses of beauty around his lockdown period: his mother’s conversations, an egg hatching, and the adventures of Igi, his iguana. Consequently, the film is an ideal prologue to It Was Just An Accident, which, even in a different context, illustrates the director’s humane necessity to film, despite the government’s attempts to stop him.
Life is now streaming.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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