Closed Curtain

Although he was sentenced to six years of house arrest and banned from making films for twenty years for “disseminating anti-Islamic propaganda” in 2010, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has managed to smuggle two films out of the country since: the documentary pamphlet This Is Not a Film and the metaphysical drama Closed Curtain. The latter film was awarded the Golden Bear for best screenplay at the Berlinale.

Closed Curtain is entirely set within the walls of a coastal villa, where a writer (played by Panahi”s old friend and co-director Kambozia Partovi) blacks out the windows, releases a dog – regarded as an unclean animal in Iran – from his sports bag and starts working in all secrecy. He is interrupted by the arrival of a boy and a girl on the run for the police. Are they outlaws? Rebels? Or is he imagining them? Much more than an existential sitting-room drama, Closed Curtain is an undisguised metaphor for the repression and depression Pahani experiences.