'This Is Not a Film' review: a sly and daring expose of life under house arrest

In December 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi (“The White Balloon,” “Offside”) was charged with committing acts of propaganda against his country its security and sentenced to a six-year jail sentence and a 20-year ban from making movies.

The following spring, while awaiting appeal of his sentence, Panahi spent an ordinary day drinking tea, taking phone calls, watching TV, listening to noises from the street, imagining a new film project, and, subversively, filming it all with the help of documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. The pair edited the footage, saved it to a flash drive and smuggled it out of Iran inside a cake. The result, entitled “This Is Not a Film,” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, 2011, and has helped direct the attention of the movie and political worlds to the plight of Iranian filmmakers and to Panahi’s situation in particular.

Predictably, not much happens in “This Is Not a Film”; dude is under house arrest, after all. But it’s absorbing and clever. Panahi’s activities -- acting out a potential future film project, letting his son’s pet iguana climb over him, reacting in fear to the noise of fireworks in the streets marking the Persian new year, collecting garbage from the other apartments in the building with the janitor -- all have a metaphorical resonance. At one point, he replaces the high-quality camera which he and Mirtahmasb have been using with his iPhone, demonstrating how easy it would be for someone with his determination to make a movie and share it with the world, governments, censors and even prisons be damned.

“This Is Not a Film” has no special effects, no soundtrack, no plot to speak of, and yet it is, in many ways, one of the most tense films you can imagine: the real stakes of real life don’t often have the shape of narrative cinema, after all, and we almost never get to see them played out in real time like this.