Essential Cinema: Jafar Panahi's The Circle At Facets
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 14, 2011 9:20PM
Taken from his home along with his wife and daughter, sentenced to prison for six years, and banned from filmmaking for 20 years, filmmaker Jafar Panahi is paying a price for free expression that most of us can only imagine. What exactly was so threatening about his movie that the Iranian government handed out such a stiff penalty? It's impossible to say, because the movie was not even half-way completed at the time of the filmmaker's arrest.
In protest of Panahi's and fellow filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's sentences, Facets Cinémathèque will show his greatest film to date, The Circle, Sunday at 1 p.m. Banned from exhibition in Iran (according to the filmmaker there has only been one showing there), The Circle is a genuine masterpiece, presenting a devastating portrait of Iranian women struggling to exist freely within the crevices of a repressive political regime and sexually regimented world where unmarried women are less than second class citizens: they are prisoners.
The film won the top award at the Venice Film festival as it helped Panahi out of the shadow of his mentor Abbas Kiarostami. His reputation as a world-class talent was solidified, but the Iranian authorities were incensed at the depiction of an Iranian society. Two subsequent films (Crimson Gold and Offside) followed, doing nothing to endear himself to the powers that be, but it seems to have been his unabashed support of the revolutionaries in the 2009 Green Revolution which set President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime over the edge. Panahi was arrested at the grave of the revolution's iconic figure, Neda Agha-Soltan. Once the word got out that he was making a film about "family and postelection developments," the government nabbed him, with his sentence finally being pronounced on December 21st of last year.
The Circle is a dazzling film, challenging and suspenseful while being and consistently entertaining. That it is both about and subject to political repression makes it a fitting tribute to Panahi's plight. The film provides a much needed corrective to the current media cycle's hyperventilated shouting match about the responsibilities and consequences of free speech in the wake of the tragedy in Tuscon. It is an experience which can re-awaken us to the political advantages of free society and also help foster the empathy with the human beings too often elided into the perverted actions of their regiume.
The film will be followed by a discussion moderated by Jerome McDonnell, host of WBEZ's Worldview, and Kaveh Ehsani of the International Studies Program at DePaul University and Kaveh Ehsani, Assistant Professor of International Studies at DePaul University.
The Circle screens Sunday, January 16 at 1 pm at Facets Cinémathèque, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., with a discussion afterwards. Admission is free.