Friday, November 6 | 8 p.m.
Saturday, November 7 | 5:30 & 8 p.m.
Sunday, November 8 | 2 & 5:30 p.m.
Thursday, November 12 | 5:30 p.m.
The third, and the most straightforwardly pleasurable film made by director Jafar Panahi since the Iranian government banned him from making movies in 2010, Taxi features the filmmaker as a cab driver, transporting a cross-section of the Tehran public in a succession of fares. At first Taxi reads as nonfiction, with the filmmaker insisting that his dashboard-mounted camera is a security device; however, as is true of the director’s most recent work (This Is Not a Film, Closed Curtain), there’s much more to Taxi than meets the eye, especially where it concerns the film’s relationships to fiction and cinéma vérité documentary. Awarded the top prize (the Golden Bear) at this year’s Berlin Film Festival—which the filmmaker’s young niece, who also appears in the film, accepted in a tear-filled ceremony—Taxi is one of the year’s most outstanding cinematic achievements, and further evidence that Panahi’s art has benefited from his legal persecution.
Director Jafar Panahi 2015 Iran 82 minutes NR DCP
