The Cameras Must Stay On: Censorship, Jafar Panahi, and "This Is Not a Film"

The creation of art is an act of cartography: it charts unknown territory, creating living, breathing atlases of worlds that can only be accessed by their singular authors. So if artistry is an act of genesis, it must have its counterforce--erasure, destruction, silence, suppression—which takes shape under the guise of censorship. Every artist’s nemesis, censorship—whether political, social, or even self-inflicted—amounts to an unnatural death inflicted upon a creature thriving in its infancy. So it seems contradictory at first glance to ponder the (non-)production circumstances of This Is Not a Film, the 2011 pseudo-documentary from Iran. Officially directed by Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and unofficially by Jafar Panahi, This Is Not a Film “turns censorship into great art,” according to IndieWire. Following a harsh legislative decision in 2010 that banned Panahi from filmmaking for 20 years after he was nebulously convicted of "conspiring against the state," he and Mirtahmasb set out to turn Panahi’s sentence inside out, obeying the letter of the law in order to implicitly denounce its spirit.

Read More