3 Faces ( Jafar Panahi, 2018): Persian | Azerbaijani

3 Faces is a 2018 Iranian theatre film directed by Jafar Panahi, starring Behnaz Jafari and Panahi. It was selected to participate in the Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. In Cannes, Panahi, and co-author Nader Saldivar won the Best Screenplay Award.

This is a suggestive piece of thought about the traditional concept of men and the status of women at home. This low-cost, budget-free film has become the purest and most glamorous Iranian film ever. The film began with a very dramatic video shot by a hysterical girl (Marziyeh Rezaie). In the film, the girl accused Mehnaz Jafari of ignoring her request, and the girl’s desire to become an actor. In fact, it is the girl who has been admitted to a prestigious school but is prevented from leaving home to study. At the end of the video, the girl hangs herself in the cave.
Panahi and Jabari assume that the video clips may be real, so they are really dead to explore this girl. The film directly criticized the feudal tradition. The opposite of all the stories in the film is about the silence of any independent expression of women. When any rule in traditional feudal thinking is broken, everything will become uncontrollable and different.

The filming technique is very unique. In the early stage, we observed the changes in the emotions and movements of the woman in a fixed second person perspective. In the meantime, we can only use the voice to speculate on the psychological activities of the man and his thoughts. When they arrived at the mountain, the two sides had a dispute because of different opinions. In the meantime, we are still a second-person perspective to observe the modal changes of women and men. After entering the village, they went to visit the girl’s home. The girl’s brother was very angry because his sister was going out to study.

In a few dexterous sequences – the whole movie from the encounter to the calm flow of encounters – we saw Behnaz, a successful actress, she was forced to endure her gender discrimination. She is trying to find Marziyeh, but the villagers regard her as a property and confuse the characters she plays with real people. While she is constantly struggling, she is also thinking about many issues. These problems are not just superficial thinking, but suggesting the drawbacks and injustices of the critics’ traditional thinking. Human rights are a matter of great concern since history.

The development of the entire film is very slow and the details are very rich. Can be called a conscience film.