‘This Is Not a Film’: the movie smuggled out of Iran inside a cake
Filmmakers often have to resort to drastic measures to complete their productions and ensure the broadest possible audience sees them, but smuggling a movie out of Iran inside a cake is definitely up there with the most unusual.
The country’s ruling authorities don’t take kindly to films that show any kind of social or political dissonance, but Jafar Panahi was determined that the world deserved to see his latest work. The government was of a completely different mindset, though, and implemented some drastic measures.
In December 2010, the director was placed under house arrest after being convicted of “making propaganda against the system,” and he was slapped with a 20-year ban on not just writing screenplays or making movies but giving interviews and even leaving the country.
The fact This Is Not a Film exists shows how Panahi treated the restrictions imposed against him, with the 76-minute documentary displaying his day-to-day life from within the confines of his own home, where he reflects on both his current situation and the art of filmmaking in general, subverting the terms and conditions of his imprisonment by doing the very thing he was instructed not to do.
Co-directed alongside Mojtaba Mirtahmasb – who ended up being arrested for his participation – This Is Not a Film is a defiant act of protest that found Panahi using the tools at his disposal to find a workaround for his inability to do the job he loves. There was still a major hurdle to overcome, and that was getting it out of Iran.
In order to do so, the documentary in its finished form was stored on a USB and then embedded inside a birthday cake so as not to raise suspicion, with Panahi having the last laugh when This Is Not a Film was screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where his plight ended up making international headlines.
Instead of making a new movie, Panahi used This Is a Film to explain the sort of picture he would have made if he was allowed to. He sits in his flat, reads dialogue from a script, and paints the picture of his process while technically operating in a grey area that prevents him from flagrantly disregarding the fine print of his at-home incarceration.
“I love the fact that he sent it to us in a cake,” Omid Djalili told The Guardian. “It’s a gift, it’s a laugh; it says a lot about the spirit of the man. I see this one as a kind of comic enterprise. Sometimes the limitations of the enterprise overwhelm him and those scenes are very moving. But he’s always fighting against that sense of futility. He never loses his sense of the ridiculous.”
It was an act of rebellion the government couldn’t do anything about until it was too late, with This Is Not a Film mocking Panahi’s circumstances at every turn, right down to its title.
