3 Faces

One of several movies Jafar Panahi has made illegally while banned from filmmaking, 3 Faces sees the director take a road trip into Iran’s cinematic history via its remote Northwest.

The film stars Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari as themselves. The pair travels to a remote village in search of Marziyeh, a young woman in trouble, and meet a number of eccentric characters along the way, including Shahrzad, an actress from pre-revolutionary Iran. The trio of women represent the past, present and future of Iran’s film industry.

Panahi, whose international reputation has only increased in the years since his censure by the Iranian state, is currently receiving his flowers for the Palme d’Or-winning It Was Just an Accident. That most recent film represents Panahi operating at his full power, using all the tools he developed over the course of the previous five features he made in secret.

Another major influence on Panahi’s history of filmmaking-as-resistance is his mentor Abbas Kiarostami. Like Kiarostami, Panahi’s films often feature scenes that take place in cars and cheeky metatextual conceits. Both factors have been essential in his ability to make great work on the down-low like 3 Faces.

“His films are always intensely watchable, though this one appears to be reaching back 20 years or so to an earlier kind of classic Iranian cinema, from a time when filmic language needed to be more encoded. It feeds off and often directly alludes to classics like Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and The Wind Shall Carry Us.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian