Cannes film festival
An unfortunate encounter with a dog sets off a chain of surreal, grotesque events that expose the corruption and tyranny at the heart of Iran

Jafar Panahi is the veteran Iranian auteur and democracy campaigner who continues to get arrested and imprisoned, to endure film-making bans and defy the law, finding loopholes through which his movies can be made and shown abroad. And the Iranian authorities, tensely and hypocritically aware of world scrutiny and indeed the soft-power prestige still to be accrued from Panahi’s eminence, appear (almost) to tolerate it.

Now Panahi has come to Cannes with what might be his most emotionally explicit film yet: a film about state violence and revenge, about the pain of tyranny that co-exists with ostensible everyday normality. There are macabre stabs of satire, black comedy and horror-farce, and the movie almost looks like an Iranian dissident tribute to Weekend at Bernie’s or even Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry.