This Is Not a Film

This Is Not a Film (2011) is a documentary by Jafar Panahi you can watch online on iFILM. He shot it inside his Tehran apartment under house arrest, waiting on an appeal against a six-year prison term and a twenty-year ban on directing, writing or talking to the foreign press.

Forbidden to make a movie, Panahi decides instead to spend a day in front of the camera doing almost nothing. He feeds his pet iguana, takes calls from his lawyer, tapes out the set of the film he was never allowed to shoot on his living-room rug, and reads its script aloud. His friend, the documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, holds the camera. The finished footage left the country on a flash drive hidden inside a cake and reached Cannes at the last minute.

It's a quiet, domestic, quietly defiant act by an artist stripped of his craft. Essential for anyone curious where life ends and cinema begins. Stream This Is Not a Film (2011) online on iFILM.