Defiant Iranian director sends banned film to Berlin fest

Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi's latest picture defying an official ban, "Taxi", will premiere Friday at the 65th Berlin film festival, marking a new chapter of his career in the shadows.
      
The 54-year-old's work is celebrated in the world's arthouses but outlawed in Iran where the regime considers his gritty, socially critical productions to be subversive.
      
He was detained for a documentary he tried to make on the unrest following Iran's disputed 2009 presidential election and officially banned from making more films for 20 years for "acting against national security and propaganda against the regime".
      
"Taxi" is the third picture he's made flouting the sentence, and while he won't be able to walk Berlin's red carpet as he is barred from travelling abroad, he issued a wrenching statement about his drive to keep working despite the risks.
      
"I'm a filmmaker. I can't do anything else but make films. Cinema is my expression and the meaning of my life," he said.
      
He said "cinema as an art" was the "main preoccupation" of his life.
      
"That is the reason why I have to continue making films under any circumstances to pay my respect and feel alive."        

In "Taxi", Panahi himself offers his impressions of contemporary Tehran from behind the wheel of a yellow cab, ducking the authorities' prying eyes by filming with a mounted dashboard camera.
      
Each person he offers a lift has a story to tell.
      
"Taxi" is one of 19 contenders for Berlin's Golden Bear top prize, to be awarded on February 14.
                      
Panahi's last movie, 2013's elegiac "Closed Curtain", was also shot in secret, in the confines of his villa on the...