Following his arrest in 2010 for supporting the movement to oust then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was slapped with a 20-year ban from making movies. In open defiance of that ruling, the 55-year-old director has continued his career, hopefully and despairingly commenting on both his own fate and the fate of Iran.
Those qualities are masterfully threaded through his latest, Taxi, a semi-fictionalized tale that serves as a bitter, beautiful portrait of modern Iran. Taking place entirely within the confines of the titular vehicle, driven by Panahi and shot using a digital camera mounted to the dash, the director navigates the busy streets of Tehran and interacts with a panoply of citizens: a teacher and a thief, who argue the morality of capital punishment; two religiously devout women desperately trying to get to a shrine; a DVD bootlegger defiantly connecting customers with culture both high (he once brought Panahi a copy of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) and low (he promises a budding film student episodes of The Big Bang Theory).