Taxi Tehran
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Taxi Tehran |
| Original title | taxi |
| Country of production | Iran |
| original language | Farsi |
| Publishing year | 2015 |
| length | 82 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 0 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jafar Panahi |
| script | Jafar Panahi |
| production | Jafar Panahi Film Production |
| occupation | |
| |
Taxi Tehran (Original title: Taxi ) is an Iranian documentary fiction by director Jafar Panahi from 2015.
A taxi drives through the streets of Tehran and picks up various passengers to take them to their destinations. Some of them realize that director Jafar Panahi is behind the wheel. He has attached a camera to the dashboard that he points at the passengers while he is talking to them.
The film celebrated its world premiere on February 6, 2015 as part of the 65th Berlinale . There he won the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize for the best film in the “Competition” section. The German theatrical release was on July 23, 2015.
Production conditions
Jafar Panahi is banned from practicing his profession by the Iranian government; he has not officially been allowed to make films since 2010. After In Film Nist (This is not a film, 2011) and Pardé (Closed Curtain, 2013), Taxi is the third film that Panahi secretly produced and smuggled out of the country for presentation at international festivals. After he had offered taxi to the Tehran Fajr film festival in vain, his film was finally submitted to the Berlinale.
action
A taxi drives through the streets of a city. After only the traffic situation is in focus from the dashboard , the driver later pans the camera in particular to the people in the vehicle, but also to things and events in the vicinity of the taxi. A person who got into the car is a middle-aged man. When a woman got in a little later, the two began a heated discussion about punishing thieves who stole the wheels of a car. While the man pleads for the execution of some thieves as a deterrent example, the woman takes the offenders into protection, since they are often enough in an emergency. In an interview, she claims to work as a teacher. However, the man hesitates to say what he does for a living. As he gets out of the car he claims he is a pickpocket; this is, however, something other than the despicable stealing of car wheels. A little later, the woman also leaves the vehicle.
When the driver does not know the way to important places in the city such as a hospital, it becomes clear that he lacks experience or local knowledge. A passenger recognizes the filmmaker Jafar Panahi in the driver and suspects that he must now work as a taxi driver due to his professional ban .
Shortly afterwards, the taxi is stopped by an excited group of people who lay a seriously injured man with bleeding from his head on the back seat and ask to drive him to the nearest hospital. A woman sits next to him who is the injured man's wife. She claims they have just had a moped accident in which her husband did not wear a helmet despite her frequent reports and is quite hysterical, fearing her husband will die. However, her husband is conscious and asks to be able to make his will while driving . His family will hardly accept it, but he intends to appoint his wife alone as heir. Panahi makes his cell phone available to record the man's last will and then gives the woman his phone number. As soon as her husband has been admitted to the hospital, she calls Panahi, just to make sure he gave her the correct number. A short time later, the woman calls again. Her husband is not in danger of life, but she still needs the recording of the will, one can never know.
Meanwhile, Panahi continues to promote the man named Omid, who recognized him. It turns out that he deals in hard-to-find and illegal copies of Western films. Omid introduces Panahi to one of his customers as his partner, who asks Panahi as an "expert" to help him with the film selection. Panahi responds to the request and gives the young man a number of recommendations. When he asks the black marketeer about it, he offers him to join his business. Panahi declines with thanks and says goodbye to the visibly disappointed Omid.
In addition, two women are transported with a goldfish bowl who live under the obsession that they will die if their two fish are not brought to the Ali Spring by 12 noon . Panahi lets her change into another taxi because he has to pick up his niece from school.
Finally his talkative niece, Hana, gets into the taxi. Her homework is to make a film. With her camera she records everything that comes in front of her lens while driving. She learned a number of rules for “showable films” from school. After that, the Islamic dress code must be observed, that women and men are not allowed to touch each other and that there is no illusion. Hana wonders how to truthfully portray reality if she is not allowed to show its negative sides. During a stopover, Hana films a boy picking up a banknote from the street that a groom has just lost while getting into the wedding car. Outraged, she asks the boy to return the money because otherwise her film would be ruined. Hana wants to show willingness to sacrifice and selflessness , so the boy's deed cannot be shown.
During a break in the journey, Panahi meets a former neighbor who shows him a video from a surveillance camera showing him being attacked in his house. He recognized the couple, but refrained from filing a complaint because he knew they were in need of money and, as he suspected based on media reports of similar cases, they were facing severe punishment.
In the further course of the journey Panahi takes with great pleasure a “flower woman” laden with roses, the lawyer and human rights activist Nasrin Sotudeh , whom he knows . She wants to see a client who has wanted to go to a volleyball game with friends and has therefore been in custody for a long time. Now she has started a hunger strike . You also talk about the professional ban that was applied for by the Bar Association against Sotudeh.
Finally Panahi parks the taxi at the Ali spring and gets out with Hana to return the wallet that one of the women with the fish must have left in the taxi. A motorcycle stops, the passenger breaks into the car and removes the camera. The cinema screen goes dark. The man notices that there is no memory card in the camera. Apparently he wanted to steal the footage from Taxi .
reception
Panahi loads “selected unsolvable problems of his suffering homeland into the car, which after a few crossroads always have to get out completely unsolved to make way for more worries: stuntedness, misogynistic inheritance law, petty crime, poverty, superstition and legal uncertainty not only the opposition step up and down [...] pain, danger of death, marital comedy, social criticism, and all of this as if by the way, drawn with a floating master hand, ”writes Dietmar Dath about taxi in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
For Anke Sterneborg from the Süddeutsche Zeitung it is “a film full of contradiction and wit, which is why you can hardly help but think of the sharpened pencils of cartoonists”.
According to Anke Sterneborg and Susan Vahabzadeh ( Süddeutsche Zeitung ), Panahi “turns the taxi that he drives through the streets of Tehran into a free space on wheels in which everything is possible - and the passengers he collects on the way become Resistance fighters. ”In the opinion of the authors, he juggled“ in a sophisticated way […] with the set pieces of fiction and reality that are already conspiratorial in Iranian cinema. ”
"Panahi's film is far more than a reflection of its own situation, but also a reflection on modern media, filmmaking and lies and truth in his country," says Hanns-Georg Rodek in the world . The “perhaps greatest miracle” for him is that taxi “does not show a trace of bitterness or doggedness”.
In the context of the awarding of the Golden Bear, the International Jury of the Berlinale 2015 also recognized the fact that Panahi did not allow himself to react to his professional ban with anger and frustration. Instead, he used Taxi to create a love letter to the cinema, to its art, its community, its country and its audience.
Web links
- Taxi Tehran in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- Institute for Cinema and Film Culture: School supplies Taxi Tehran. (PDF; 4.7 MB)
- Film data sheet on berlinale.de
- Official German website from Weltkino Filmverleih
- Iranian director smuggles banned film for showing , Spiegel-online , 7 February 2015.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for Taxi Tehran . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , June 2015 (PDF; test number: 152 307 K).
- ↑ Berlinale Awards Ceremony - In Taxi to Truth on faz.net, accessed on February 15, 2015
- ↑ Information on berlinale.de , accessed on February 15, 2015
- ↑ Tobias Mayer: Berlinale winner “Taxi” has German cinema release. Film releases , February 18, 2015, accessed April 1, 2015 .
- ^ "Freiraum auf Wheels", Süddeutsche Zeitung of February 16, 2015
- ↑ Dietmar Dath: The truth as a ride. FAZ, February 7, 2015, accessed on February 14, 2015 .
- ↑ Anke Sterneborg: By taxi through Tehran. sueddeutsche.de, February 7, 2015, accessed on February 14, 2015 .
- ↑ Anke Sterneborg and Susan Vahabzadeh: Freiraum auf Wheels . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of February 16, 2015, p. 9.
- ↑ Hanns-Georg Rodek: This taxi ride through Tehran is life-threatening. Die Welt , February 6, 2015, accessed on February 14, 2015 .
- ↑ Darren Aronofsky on the jury's decision. Award ceremony of the 65th Berlinale. (No longer available online.) February 14, 2015, archived from the original on February 13, 2015 ; accessed on February 15, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
