Honolulu cinephiles and museumgoers are in for a rare chance to watch A Panahi Quartet, a month-long series of four of Panahi’s politically trenchant films. All films in the program, organized by theatre manager Sarah Fang, have never been screened on island since their respective premieres at the Hawai‘i International Film Festival.

The Circle
Directed by Jafar Panahi, 2000, Iran, 90 min.
Apr. 2, 18 and 24 at 2:00 p.m.
Panahi’s Golden Lion–winning drama interweaves the stories of several Iranian women who, over the course of a single day, confront legal and societal restrictions that dictate nearly every aspect of their lives. 

With its fluid structure and urgent realism, The Circle exposes the systemic barriers facing women in Iran, creating a tense, compassionate portrait of lives lived under constant surveillance and constraint. See the trailer.

Crimson Gold
Directed by Jafar Panahi, 2003, Iran, 95 min.
Apr. 18 at 7:00 p.m. and Apr. 23 at 2:00 p.m.
Two master filmmakers, Abba Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry) and Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Taxi) team up as writer and director, respectively, on Crimson Gold, a subtle tragedy on class conflict in modern Iran. 

Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin, a real-life pizza delivery man who has schizophrenia) is a lumbering war veteran swollen by cortisone (for lingering pain from combat injuries) and reduced to delivering pizzas at night. Through his nightly rounds, he bears witness to the rewards and vanities of Tehran’s wealthy. He is humiliated when a jewelry shop owner treats him rudely and won’t allow him in his store. When an eccentric socialite gives him a taste of luxury, Hussein, under pressure to get married, can no longer accept his lowly status. 

Kiarostami based the story on an actual newspaper account of a botched robbery attempt at a Tehran jewelry store by a desperate pizza deliveryman. See the trailer.

Offside
Directed by Jafar Panahi, 2006, Iran, 93 min.
Apr. 3, 16 and 19 at 2:00 p.m.
This award-winning film casually and sometimes caustically uncovers what binds us—and blinds us—to the differences between ways of life in the West and modern-day Iran. Fascinating, funny, and tragic, Offside is “a gem of comic action...that explores the ambiguity between the sexes” (The Hollywood Reporter). The Tehran soccer stadium roars with 100,000 cheering men—according to Islamic custom, women are not allowed to attend. The ambitious girls who manage to sneak in are caught and sent to a holding pen, guarded by male soldiers their own age. Duty makes the young men and women adversaries, but duty can't overcome their shared dreams, their mutual attraction, and ultimately their overriding sense of national pride and humanity. See the trailer.

3 Faces
Directed by Jafar Panahi, 2019, Iran, 101 min.
Apr. 17 and 25 at 2:00 p.m.; Apr. 24 at 7:00 p.m.
This film is Iranian master filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking. 3 Faces is a courageous act of antipatriarchal defiance from an artist who has refused to be silenced. This playful docufiction road movie begins with a smartphone video sent to Panahi (or a version of him) and real-life star Behnaz Jafari by a desperate young woman who, distraught at her family’s refusal to let her study drama, seemingly records her own suicide. Traveling to the woman’s rural hometown to investigate, Panahi and Jafari find themselves launched on a slyly comic, quietly revelatory journey that builds in narrative, thematic, and visual intricacy to put forth a grand expression of community and solidarity under the eye of oppression. See the trailer.