Jafar Panahi has extraordinary nerve and courage. In 2010, in Tehran, he received a six-year sentence – enforceable at any time – for ‘propaganda against the regime’ and a ban on writing or directing for 20 years. Yet the following year he made This Is Not a Film, where he talks about and walks through a filmscript. In 2015’s Taxi Tehran we get a portrait of the city as he drives a taxi and a static dashboard camera records the passengers. In 3 Faces he pushes the boundaries further in a road trip and many odd but believable encounters with people in his Azeri home region.
The set-up is dramatic. Panahi has driven there, with the well-known Iranian actor Behnaz Jafari, because a teenage girl in a mountain village has sent him a mobile-phone video. In it she says she has tried to contact Jafari but he has ignored her many phone calls and messages. She says she’d pleaded with the filmmaker to help her take up a place at the Tehran conservatory to become an actor. Her parents wouldn’t let her to go, the villagers shunned her – could Jafari not have stepped in and persuaded her parents? The video does not end well.
