totalfilm

Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, The Circle) is one of Iran’s finest directors.

He’s also deeply unpopular with the ayatollahs, and in 2010 found himself facing a six-year jail sentence and 20-year ban on filmmaking.

Undaunted, he responded with this home-movie-style ‘effort’. We see Panahi mooching about his Tehran apartment, feeding his daughter’s pet iguana, watching clips of his own films and describing one he wasn’t allowed to make.

Smuggled out – in a cake! – to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, this is an ironic, quietly contemptuous response to a stupidly repressive regime.