Jafar Panahi

Jafar Panâhi (Persian: جعفر پناهی, [d͡ʒæˈfæɾ pænɒːˈhiː]) (born 11 July 1960) is an Iranian film director, screenwriter, and editor. He is known internationally for his contributions to Iranian cinema and has received numerous awards at major film festivals, including the Palme d'Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival for It Was Just an Accident, the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for Taxi (2015), and the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for The Circle (2000). These accolades make him the fourth filmmaker — after Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman — to win the top prizes at the Big Three film festivals. In 2025, he was awarded the Telluride Film Festival Silver Medallion.

Panahi began his career making short films and working as an assistant to Abbas Kiarostami. His debut feature, The White Balloon (1995), won the Caméra d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, marking the first major award for an Iranian film at that event. He has since been associated with the Iranian New Wave and often explores themes of social injustice and restrictions, political oppression, and the experiences of marginalized individuals in Iran.

His films have frequently been banned in Iran, and his career has been marked by conflict with Iranian authorities. In 2010, he was arrested and later sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking and travel. Despite these restrictions, he continued to produce films, including This Is Not a Film (2011), which was smuggled out of Iran for screening at Cannes.

Other notable works include The Mirror (1997), Offside (2006), Closed Curtain (2013), 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022).

Jafar Panahi was born in Mianeh, Iran, to an Iranian Azerbaijani family, which he has described as working-class. He grew up with four sisters and two brothers. His father worked as a house painter. His family spoke Azerbaijani at home, but Persian with other Iranians. When he was ten years old he used an 8 mm film camera. He also acted in one film and assisted Kanoon's library director in running a program that taught children how to operate a film camera.

Starting at age 12, Panahi worked after school in order to afford to go and see films. His impoverished childhood helped form the humanistic worldview of his films.

At age 20 Panahi was conscripted into the Iranian army and served in the Iran–Iraq War, working as an army cinematographer from 1980 to 1982. In 1981 he was captured by Kurdish rebels and held for 76 days.

From his war experiences he made a documentary that was eventually shown on TV. After completing his military service, Panahi enrolled at the College of Cinema and TV in Tehran, where he studied filmmaking and especially appreciated the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard. There he first met and befriended filmmaker Parviz Shahbazi and cinematographer Farzad Jodat, who shot all of Panahi's early work. During college he interned at the Bandar Abbas Center on the Persian Gulf Coast, where he made his first short documentary films. He also began working as an assistant director on his professor's films before graduating in 1988.