Golden Palm in Cannes – Iranian director Jafar Panahi: The Indomitable

A moving sight that remains in the memory: he just sat there, his hands crossed behind his head, while everyone was up and applauded around him. After a few seconds he also rose. This picture not only symbolizes its fate, but also the years of resistance in Iran: the exhaustion, the hardness of the path and the bitterness of the forbidden – and yet full of strength and hope.

Jafar Panahi’s success is celebrated worldwide. But Iranian state television describes the Golden Palm of Cannes, which he won for his film “Un Simple Accident”, as artistic “meaningless” and accuses the festival of political motivation. France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot expressed his congratulations towards Panahi and spoke of a “gesture of resistance to oppression by the Iranian regime”. Also due to his statements, the highest ranked French diplomat was ordered in Tehran.

However, Panahi was praised by many people in Iran, filmmakers and personalities from culture and politics. He is one of the few directors who managed to win all three highly vocated prices of Venice, the Berlinale and Cannes. The films Jafar Panahis show the forbidden – for many, his success means the victory of truth about censorship and resistance about silence.

Panahi demonstrates how committed art itself can cause admiration worldwide behind the walls of censorship. With his films, he struggles against injustice, inhumanity and repression and critically deals with the rulers in Iran. It is always about the life and problems of the people on the street or anywhere else he encounters.

His latest film is characterized by his seven -month prison experience and the stories of the people he met there. The secretly shot film becomes an act of resistance to the Iranian Hijab regulations by presenting unexpectedirated women. The plot follows a group of former prisoners who are convinced that they have found their former torter. Before this confrontation, you are faced with the excruciating decision: retaliation or waiver of revenge?

Exactly these stories make Panahi’s films so popular. The Golden Palm in Cannes, which the tireless director of Iranian independent cinema won, is above all an opportunity for the Iranian underground cinema on the world stage-a cinema that has taken an unconventional path and, despite all the resistance, raises his voice.