<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not that brave,\u201d the Iranian director Jafar Panahi told<\/a> Film Comment<\/em> in an interview earlier this year. \u201cI\u2019m just doing my job. I\u2019m making my films\u2026. I feel a bit embarrassed when this is seen as courage.\u201d<\/p>\n Such humility is becoming in any filmmaker, especially one clutching a Palme d\u2019Or. The citation, bestowed at Cannes upon Panahi\u2019s new film, It Was Just an Accident, <\/em>gave the 65-year-old director a lifetime sweep of the world\u2019s top film festival prizes, along with a Golden Bear from Berlin and a Lion from Venice. Panahi\u2019s modesty serves as an extension of the humane sensibility that suffuses his films\u2014an empathy that transcends simple technique. It also belies the obvious and lamentable fact that Panahi has had a very hard time<\/a> doing his job for some while now.<\/p>\n The 1979 Islamic Revolution didn\u2019t just transform the Iranian film industry. It rendered it a shadow of its former self, with directors forced to observe<\/a> strict limitations on form and content in the name of religious purity. Panahi began working as an army cinematographer in the early 1980s, enrolling in film school after his military service and producing a series of television documentaries before shooting his beguiling, child\u2019s-eye debut, The White Balloon,<\/em> in 1995. He is a fluid, intuitive storyteller and a conscientious social critic; he has a gift for crafting deceptively conceptual story structures and for making the quotidian signify beyond itself.<\/p>\n Rather than submit to the dictates of Iran\u2019s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance\u2014where the buck stops for filmmakers in search of official support or theatrical distribution\u2014Panahi has continually striven for creative freedom, whether via procedural ruses like <\/span>submitting<\/a> fake scripts for committee approval or else by ignoring the authorities\u2019 input entirely. The extravagant praise bestowed on his films by international critics has, predictably, served to exacerbate his perceived enemy-of-the-state status at home; in 2010, following a series of increasingly public skirmishes with the authorities, Panahi was detained and imprisoned by the Iranian government on charges of disseminating propaganda against the regime. He was sentenced to six years in prison (a stretch eventually reduced to house arrest) and also a 20-year ban on travel, foreign media interviews, and filmmaking of any kind. The latter, it seemed, was a cruel and unusual punishment: an edict designed both to staunch a fearless artist\u2019s output, and also to break his spirit.<\/span><\/p>\n It didn\u2019t work\u2014at all. Throughout the 2010s, Panahi conjured up a series of small, clandestinely shot films that dramatized, fictionalized, and allegorized his experiences, often with a wry sense of humor. The Magritte-inspired title of Panahi\u2019s 2011 masterpiece<\/a> This Is Not a Film,<\/em> a ruefully funny video diary primarily shot on an \u00adiPhone in the director\u2019s apartment, precisely annotated the nature of its maker\u2019s resistance: It proclaimed that he was following the rules set down from on high even as he was breaking them, an act of cinematic sleight of hand in manacles, and with his fingers crossed slyly behind his back.<\/p>\n