The Film Verdict Review (Without Permission 2025)

VERDICT: A sense of déja vu permeates the Busan competition entry 'Without Permission', British-Iranian Hassan Nazer’s awkwardly dated tribute to the subversive spirit of Iran's filmmakers.

Clarence Tsui

September 21st, 2025

A filmmaking protagonist – check. Cute children speaking their minds to the camera – check. Car shots – check. The list could go on and on, and Without Permission could probably tick each and every of the boxes. Starting off with an on-screen acknowledgement of Abbas Kiarostami’s work, Hassan Nazer’s latest feature resembles – at least for those in the know – an hour-and-a-half homage to the quietly subversive creative strategies of the Iranian New Wave, something the British-Iranian filmmaker did with aplomb two years ago in his endearing Winners.

The Iranian film director at the center of Without Permission says he’s suffering from a “terrible misfortune”. But he isn’t about to be slapped with a 20-year filmmaking ban, have his passport confiscated, or thrown into jail. No: his application for a shoot was rejected by the state censors, leaving him with the oh-so-demeaning prospect of making a clandestine movie with children in a basement. “I wish somebody would make a film about me,” the man laments, crying to the gods from his car. “A filmmaker who has to shoot his film secretly in a cellar!”

Is this line written out of jest, perhaps a reference to the hard-boiled, self-absorbed filmmakers which prop up films such as Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us? Or is this an earnest riposte against the Iranian authorities’ long-running campaign in silencing dissenting artists, which has led to the multiple convictions and imprisonment of cineastes such as Jafar Panahi and Mohammed Rassoulof?

Either way, Without Permission is problematic: the former, more cynical scenario will render Nazer’s whole premise about a cineaste’s resistance to censorship moot. If the latter is true, then the film was perhaps made a few years too late, with a new generation of Iranian filmmakers (and Iranians in general) already evolved towards other means of resistance. It bears a definite resemblance, at least thematically, to Ali Asgari’s deadpan tale of a frustrated and thwarted filmmaker in Divine Comedy, which recently screened in Venice’s Horizons.

A hybrid of fiction and documentary, Without Permission revolves around the attempt for a fictional, exiled Iranian director (played by real-life Iranian filmmaker Behrouz Sebt Rasoul) and his assistant (Setareh Fakhaari) to circumvent censors and produce a literally underground film somewhere far from the city. Proclaiming he wants to “hear from youth”, the director drives around the countryside to recruit local children for the shoot, asking elementary-age kids about what they love to do, wear and play.

Taking a leaf from a similar experiment in Kiarostami’s 1989 documentary Homework (with children talking about school), Nazer reveals the different values of kids from different social, economic and cultural backgrounds. But the one thing the director (or Nazer himself) wants to know is the children’s attitude towards love of the romantic kind. This, he believes, will reveal the impact of stringent religious dogma on the way these boys and girls regard and treat each other. But the exercise becomes increasingly questionable as the children are asked to improvise lines about love with a participant of the other sex.

The director (both the one on and off screen) might congratulate himself for having provoked his charges to think freely, but one struggles to see the point of casting them as dating lovebirds in staged scenes – apart from being a mischievous schtick designed to rile those ultra-conservative clerics with their interdicts against the public display of any form of intimacy in Iran.

Perhaps to press home the objective of his experiment, Nazer leavens the main narrative with sporadic fictional scenes of marital disharmony between a warring couple and their combative exchanges with unsympathetic (and unseen) judges during the woman’s application for a separation. However, these episodes are basically overwhelmed by Nazer’s main premise – which is about a director saying, “I have a question and I needed to satisfy my curiosity.” It takes much more than this to make a film fair for its participants, enlightening for its audience and maddening for the tyrants reigning supreme with their repressive regimes.

Director, screenwriter, producer: Hassan NazerCast: Behrouz Sebt Rasoul, Setareh FakhaariWorld sales: DreamLab FilmsVenue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)In Persian80 minutes