Three Faces

Jafar Panahi, a banned Iranian director and the winner of Cannes 2025, continues to make films despite the direct ban on filmmaking. One of his films (not this one) was smuggled into Cannes on a flash drive hidden in a cake.

This film begins with a mysterious video sent to the famous actress Behnaz Jafari (who plays herself). It shows the suicide of a young girl who asks for help: she wants to pursue singing, but her relatives are against it. Jafari calls a friend-director (Panahi himself, of course), and together they go to the Iranian countryside to find out what happened. Along the way, they learn all about conservative and traditional Iran, where the prevailing patriarchy still believes in signs and rituals, denies women the right to self-determination, and is passive in terms of the country's development and life. That's how they live.