The latest work by the renowned Iranian director and dissident Jafar Panahi, 3 Faces is a study of lack of freedom and how it is overcome in Iranian society, filmed in the director's signature half documentary, half fiction style.
Young Marziyeh hopes to be an actress, but her parents trick her into giving up this dream and marrying instead. On the verge of suicide, she records a video in which she asks the popular Iranian actress Behnaz Jafari to convince her family to let her go to study in Tehran.
In order to learn the fate of Marziyeh, Behnaz and Panahi drive to the girl’s native village. Traveling winding roads and meeting talkative strangers, they seem to become the protagonists of a film by another Iranian master, Abbas Kiarostami, a pioneering figure in Iranian cinema who blurred the boundary between document and fiction by seeing their connection as a metaphor for the relationship between truth and lies in society.
In 3 Faces this duality of fact and fiction is mirrored in the dual morality of Iranian reality, where the official patriarchal narrative does not exclude a critical position, protest or even rebellion by an individual, whether it is the young actress Marziyeh or Panahi himself, who has been making films in his home, country house or car for more than ten years now, despite being banned from professional filmmaking. This, his fourth film, was shot in circumvention of censorship restrictions and features the director as himself. It won the Best Screenplay award at the 71st Cannes Film Festival.
The film will be screened in Turkish, Persian, and Azerbaijani with Russian subtitles.
3 Faces
Dir. Jafar Panahi
Iran, USA, 2018. 100 min. 18+