Why a Cannes-winning Iranian filmmaker had to make his new film in hiding

Even after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes for It Was Just an Accident , Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi remains a man who cannot work in the open. His latest film, a daring, darkly comic meditation on revenge and morality, was shot in secret, smuggled out of Iran, and finished in France. For a director once jailed for “propaganda against the system,” it is both an act of defiance and a mirror of the repression that fuels his art. Jafar Panahi (born July 11, 1960, in Mianeh, Iran) is among the world’s most acclaimed and resilient filmmakers. Closely associated with the Iranian New Wave, Panahi’s work has long confronted the country’s political constraints and the everyday lives of those caught within them. His debut feature, The White Balloon (1995), won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes,