Iranian Cinema
At Cannes in 1997, the Palme d'Or was shared by two films: Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry and Shohei Imamura's The Eel. On this map, the first sits in this band; the second sits in Japan's stream, on the far right. Two currents drawn separately here met, that year, on top of a single trophy. Kiarostami's win nearly didn't happen. A deputy minister of culture tried to block the film from being sent to Cannes, on the grounds that it hadn't been accepted at Iran's own festival. Cannes intervened directly, and the film made it in at the last moment. The films in this band found ways to shoot by working around what couldn't be shot: centering a child as the protagonist, filming conversations inside a car with a fixed camera, having real people play versions of themselves to blur the line between documentary and fiction. These have been read as strategies for evading censorship (I could not find a direct statement from any filmmaker confirming this). The starkest case came in 2011. Jafar Panahi, convicted for criticizing the government, was sentenced to six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking, and was under house arrest while appealing. In that house, he shot This Is Not a Film. He put it on a flash drive, hid the drive inside a birthday cake, and had it smuggled out of the country. It screened at Cannes on May 20. Several threads on this map trace the same line: constraint forcing invention. Neorealism, born when studios were unusable and filmmakers went into the street. Jaws, whose mechanical shark kept breaking, so the film chose not to show it. Practical effects born from schedules too short for anything but puppets. Dogme 95, a set of rules its own makers imposed on themselves. And a USB drive inside a cake.