I met Iranian director Jafar Panahi back in 1996, shortly before his debut feature film "The White Balloon" picked up the Gold Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival — one of many prizes that film garnered. My interview has been lost to the sands of time (hard to believe, but there was a time when everything wasn't archived on the Net) but I still recall my conversation with the soft-spoken director, and asking him about making films in a country with state censorship.
Panahi was diplomatic, but pointed out how censorship was also the mother of invention, that the inability to state something directly led to the poetics of saying it indirectly, a subtlety that Western cinema had perhaps lost along the way to total freedom of expression.
Hardly the words of a fire-breathing revolutionary, and I wrote at the time that Panahi's humanist look at Tehran through a child's eyes was an attempt to deliberately depoliticize Iran's depiction in cinema. I have rarely been more wrong in my assessment of a filmmaker; by his third film, "The Circle" (2000), which dealt with the treatment of women in Iran and the state's ability to jail them on the flimsiest of morality charges, it was clear that Pahani was walking on the edge; "The Circle" was banned in Iran, as were all his subsequent works.