It's easy to imagine what it must be like to work as a taxi driver in Tehran, and filmmaker Jafar Panahi seems to have done just that. He employed a clever tactic—appearing as a regular cabbie—so he could film passengers and capture slices of life within the city. We’ve all encountered drivers who are full of opinions, but here, the person behind the wheel mostly stays quiet, allowing his riders to speak for themselv…

This is a truly unusual film experience, unlike anything else I’ve seen. It's a docudrama, directed by and starring Jafar Panahi. This is my first exposure to his work, and I was quite impressed. I also discovered that he has been prohibited from filmmaking and leaving the country for the past five years. However, he found legal ways to continue creating films, and this movie is the result of those efforts. He had pr…