Jafar Panahi: Urgency at Low Volume

Jafar Panahi rarely needs a grand speech to make the political pressure in a scene felt. In This Is Not a Film, frustration grows from the absence of the film he has been prevented from making and the limits of what can be recreated inside his home. The scene remains quiet, but its circumstances give every decision weight.

This final November session returns to the masking-tape sequence from This Is Not a Film, co-directed by Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. With Sammy Holden, we will consider how an unfinished action can carry urgency, and how leaving something outside the frame may say more than showing it directly.

The evening is built around one question:

Can a film feel urgent without becoming loud?

Each group will develop a production-ready plan for a short scene. The brief allows one space, one argument, one object and an event that remains off-screen. From that, the…