For most of it, you are not sure what you are looking at, but you surely know why. This Is Not a Film is one of the most eccentric and compelling documentaries out there at the moment - film credits included.
Everything starts with director Jafar Panahi having breakfast. In front of a camera. Then we see Panahi filmed by Mojtaba Mirtahmas. He decided that if he will not be able to make his movie – Panahi is currently condemned to six years of prison and banned from producing any movie or leaving Iran
Shot in a day, This Is Not a Film documents Panahi’s struggle to overcome the inactivity imposed on him by the government. He is caught into a restless dance around a misused camera: firstly filming himself, then being filmed and finally filming. But the camera is not capturing a movie and this is the point. What the documentary points at is what is not there: a censored film. In its form – so unpredictable, so domestic and so loose – the documentary actually holds onto a strong message. While Panahi struggles to tell us how the film would have been, one cannot but wonder what we are missing by not being able to see it.
Quite ironically, Panahi’s situation in the documentary, turns out to be surprisingly close to that of the heroine in his censored film. Its plot tells the story of young Iranian girl who is accepted to an art school, but who is obstructed by her parents, who decide to lock her in her house. One wonders if, down the most surprising and unexpected path, This Is Not a Film ends up carrying a bit of that film in its essence.
This Is Not a Film is a documentary which affirms its genre while confronting the fictional genre. If part of its message is political, part of it is lyrical. Panahi offers us, in some distracted moments, some important reflections on film as an artistic reality bound to its own rules, its own mechanism and to its own irreplaceable dimension. In doing so, however, the power and beauty of documentary are affirmed. To the absence of a censured film, corresponds the tangible record of a subversive - one is temped to say despite the title - artistic act.
As soon as Panahi takes the camera we feel his emotion and excitement and, for a short moment, we see a director in action again… but not for long. The last words we hear are: ‘don’t come out, they could see you with the camera’…
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