Film

This Is Not a Film

  • Crime
  • Very dark
  • Slow-burning

Shot inside Jafar Panahi's Tehran apartment while he awaited an appeal against prison and a twenty-year filmmaking ban, this is barely a film and entirely one — an artist testing the precise edge of what he's forbidden to do, narrating scripts he can't shoot, feeding his daughter's pet iguana, waiting for a phone call. Tense, funny, quietly furious, and less about oppression than the stubborn need to keep making things.

TMDb rating3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you are drawn to films that blur the line between document and confession, and to quiet rooms where a filmmaker's defiance shows up in small, ordinary gestures.

Skip it if you need a story with a plot, since little here moves forward; long stretches of Panahi simply sitting around his flat can feel like waiting too.

What it asks of you: At seventy-eight minutes it is short but unhurried, with the frame often held still while a day of restlessness unspools; patience counts for more than attention.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Taxi Driver1976

Panahi's audacious follow-up, made three years later while still under the same ban, turns a cab into a rolling camera and a portrait of Tehran. His wit and defiance are sharper here, not softer.

But Same restrictions, same loose non-actor conversations — if you found this film's rawness demanding, that continues.

Taxi Driver poster

A Separation2011

Farhadi's Oscar-winning drama of a marriage collapsing under Iran's legal and social pressures shows Iranian cinema working within its restrictions rather than against them, and still saying everything it needs to.

But It's scripted and conventional in structure; you lose the DIY, real-time tension of watching a ban get tested as it happens.

A Separation poster

The Lives of Others2006

A Stasi officer's surveillance of an artist becomes a study of watching and being watched under an authoritarian state — cinema as both target and witness, decades before Panahi's own house arrest.

But It's polished, plotted, German, and fictional — everything Panahi's film deliberately isn't. Some intimacy is traded for craft.

The Lives of Others poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from This Is Not a Film

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Big Brother2000

Both watch confinement collapse the line between self and performance — Panahi records a life he's forbidden to fictionalize, Big Brother contestants fictionalize a life they're stuck living. Same camera-in-a-house premise, opposite motives.

The reality format built entirely on people trapped in a house under constant surveillance, performing themselves for an audience they can't see — watch an early season and you'll recognize the exact premise, minus the state and the stakes.

But It's junk-food television, gleefully artificial and often cruel, with none of the moral seriousness that makes Panahi's film matter.

Big Brother poster
More like this (8)

Citizenfour2014

Real fear, filmed almost by accident in a cramped hotel room — Laura Poitras's Snowden documentary shares that same claustrophobic, is-this-actually-happening tension as events outrun the camera.

But It's about state surveillance and geopolitics rather than artistic freedom; the stakes are colder and more procedural.

Citizenfour poster

Persepolis2007

Marjane Satrapi's animated memoir of growing up through the Iranian Revolution gives you the political backstory in a wildly different, wholly accessible form — funny, sad, and clear-eyed.

But Animation and dark humor soften edges that Panahi's film leaves deliberately raw and unresolved.

Persepolis poster

The Act of Killing2012

Joshua Oppenheimer lets perpetrators of Indonesian mass killings restage their crimes as cinema, exposing how filmmaking itself can be an act of power, confession, or evasion.

But Its subject is horrifying rather than hopeful; the moral vertigo it induces is far darker than anything here.

The Act of Killing poster

Waltz with Bashir2008

Ari Folman's animated documentary about memory and the Lebanon War shows another way a filmmaker turns personal trauma and political history into unconventional, formally daring nonfiction.

But The animation and dreamlike tone create distance where Panahi's film insists on unbearable, unmediated closeness.

Waltz with Bashir poster

The Square2013

A ground-level documentary of the Egyptian revolution, made by people risking their safety to keep filming when the state wanted no record of any of it at all.

But It's expansive and chaotic where Panahi's film is intimate and still; you trade one room for an entire uprising.

The Square poster

No One Knows About Persian Cats2009

Bahman Ghobadi's semi-fictional chronicle of Tehran's underground musicians, banned in Iran, captures the same defiant, make-it-anyway spirit from a younger, noisier angle.

But Looser and more youthful in tone — a scrappy road movie rather than a sustained, disciplined meditation.

No One Knows About Persian Cats poster

Film1965

Panahi turns his own apartment into a stage for the same question Beckett asks — can a self survive being filmed? — except Beckett answers with absurdist despair and Panahi with stubborn, embattled hope.

Samuel Beckett's only screenplay, starring an aged Buster Keaton fleeing the camera's gaze around a single room, is twenty-four wordless minutes of existential comedy about the terror of being observed.

But Silent, cryptic, avant-garde — a philosophy experiment more than a story, demanding a patience most 78-minute documentaries never ask for.

Film poster

Dogtooth2009

Where Panahi resists confinement by documenting its absurd literalism, Lanthimos imagines confinement so total the prisoners stop recognizing it as such — two studies of how captivity invents its own reality to survive itself.

A Greek fable about three adult siblings kept entirely inside their family's walled property by parents who've invented an alternate language and geography just to keep them there, believing it's for their own good.

But Deliberately unsettling and morally opaque — its dark humor sits closer to cruelty than to the warmth in Panahi's film.

Dogtooth poster

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This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Five Broken Cameras, Celluloid Man, Closed Curtain