In December 2010 Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to a 20-year ban on directing movies or writing screenplays. Despite these restrictions, Panahi has somehow managed to make several fine films in the years since the ban, including This Is Not A Film, a documentary that was shown at Cannes in 2011, the film having been smuggled out of Iran inside a cake.

3 Faces is the latest clandestine film from Panahi (I'm not sure what kind of baked good was used to get this one out of Iran and onto the film festival circuit). Panahi and Iranian actress Behnaz Jafari play themselves in the film, which opens as the pair are driving from Tehran to a remote village in the mountains, to investigate what appears to be a young woman's suicide, which was recorded by the young woman on her cell phone. In the video, the young woman is desperate, and pleads for Jafari's help. As they drive towards and into the mountains, Jafari and Panahi debate the video: is it real, or was the suicide a clever fake?

Despite this rather dark opening, the tone of 3 Faces is surprisingly light, especially when you consider the hardships under which Panahi must have worked. As in any good road movie, the pair encounter a range of eccentric characters on their journey, beginning with an older man walking along the narrow dirt road, who teaches Panahi the complex system of signals that the villagers have developed to ensure that a car driving along the one-way road towards a blind corner doesn't meet another car going in the opposite direction: one honk to indicate you'd like to proceed; two honks if it's an emergency; and a single, long honk to say that it's a real emergency.

When they eventually reach the young woman's village, the pair are recognized, and greeted with great fanfare—until the villagers realize that they haven't come to offer aid to the village after all. As Panahi and Jafari try to ascertain the fate of the young woman in the video, they meet with her family, with her best friend, and with an eccentric woman, a former "entertainer," whom the villagers have ostracized, and who now lives alone on the outskirts of the village (much happier, it appears, now that she no longer cares about the villagers' opinions of her). A lot of the humour in the film comes from this clash of cultures: the villagers being quite disdainful of the "sophisticated" city-dwellers temporarily in their midst.

I don't want to give any more of the plot away, but will just say that the film deals with the penalties meted out to those who dare to go against the conventions and expectations of the society at large, and in that sense, Panahi is commenting on his own situation in Iran. I enjoyed 3 Faces quite a lot, and plan to track down other films by Panahi (I see that several are available in our local library, including The White Balloon, the 1995 feature which won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes).

3 Faces is one of the films selected to be screened after VIFF, during VIFF Repeats, so if you missed it during the festival itself, you still have a chance. There's a trailer for it here.