Mina Kavani

“A candle to Saint Michael, another to the devil.” Picasso and his alter ego. Like Harlequin: elusive. The artist, the man, the lover.

In his new virtuosic sleight-of-hand—completed shortly before his imprisonment in July 2022—Jafar Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, who has relocated to a rural border town in Iran to remotely direct a new film in nearby Turkey. While there, he finds himself thrust in the middle of a local scandal, confronting the opposing pulls of tradition and progress.