Directed by Jafar Panahi | 75 mins | 2011
Placed on house arrest by the Iranian government and forbidden from any further filmmaking activity for the following 20 years, Panahi used the slender resources at his command—his own apartment as a “set,” the aide of friends, including credited co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who could handle the iPhone camera and thereby keep Panahi from violating his punishment on a technicality—to produce one of the crucial works of the 2010s, a portrait of an artist physically confined but spiritually unbowed, catching up with peers and with his own work, and still passionately engaged with the world from which he’s been cut off. “[A] brave and witty video diary, an essay on the struggle between tyranny and the creative imagination.” —The New York Times