Taxi Tehran

Jafar Panahi was under a 20-year filmmaking ban and facing a six-year prison sentence when he made Taxi Tehran. His crime: "propaganda against the system." His response: this film — shot clandestinely with a dashboard camera, starring himself as a taxi driver picking up Tehranis who don't know they're in a movie.

The passengers are a cross-section of Iranian society: a DVD pirate who sells banned films, two superstitious women transporting a goldfish, a human rights lawyer who recognizes Panahi and urges him to continue making films, his own niece who has been taught at school that films must be "distributable" — meaning politically sanitized. Each conversation is improvised, and the cumulative effect is a portrait of a society under surveillance that has learned to speak in code.

Taxi Tehran won the Golden Bear at Berlin. Panahi couldn't attend to accept it. The film was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick hidden in a cake. That the film exists at all is a miracle; that it is also warm, funny, and deeply human is proof that Panahi is one of the great directors of our time.