Jafar Panahi is an Iranian filmmaker banned from making films. To do what he considers his job and his calling is to break the law. To buy one of his films in Iran is to break the law. A six-year jail sentence looks likely. His response? To make more films, his latest being Taxi Tehran. Panahi’s indie masterpiece has a cab driving around the Iranian capital, picking up a ragtag collection of friends and strangers around the city while filming each encounter through a camera concealed on the dashboard.

This could have been an angry film, an outraged film, a self-righteous or an indignant film. I am glad that Panahi took it in a different direction. Its tone is instead quiet, cheerful, and playful, with the director himself amiable but laconic in the driver’s seat.

The first passengers are a man and a woman in the taxi who have a heated argument about capital punishment: the man argues it would deter crime to have two people executed every now and then, while the woman, a schoolteacher, argues for the humanity of the criminals. The director sits there and does not contribute to the conversation.

Are these actors? This is a question the film asks. Immediately after the two strangers leave the taxi, we meet a third passenger who recognises the director and tells him he knows that the previous pair were just actors. He recognises their conversation, he says, from one of Panahi’s previous movies. Panahi does not confirm or deny this assertion. As the film goes on, we meet more peculiar personalities: a badly injured man who needs to be taken to hospital, the director’s sassy niece, an enigmatic family friend and my personal favourite: two women who are in a rush to return their goldfish to a sacred spring.

What makes this series of everyday encounters screenworthy? This is yet another question the film poses. A film student Panahi meets asks him how to come up with a concept worthy of the big screen, the major irony being that this conversation is itself ‘screenworthy’ enough to be beamed for a paying audience in a different country thousands of miles away. Later Panahi’s brazen niece, who is one of the film’s high points, despairs that some footage she shot for a film competition is not ‘screenworthy’ as it includes a poor child taking some money dropped by a wealthy couple. Her teacher said the film must not contain, she explains, any “sordid realism”.

Watching Taxi Tehran was one of the more unusual film experiences I have had this year. It’s a bit like sharing a long taxi ride with a group of interesting and funny people – despite the heavy issues going on behind the scenes, the film itself is gently amusing and entertaining without ever being particularly tense. This is not a film to see on a Friday night with a lot of friends; it is not the Iranian Collateral. If you’re in the mood for something relaxed but intriguing, this is your screenplay. It invites the audience members to think along with it, to consider the difficult debates the characters have.

Its success as a film is itself a persuasive argument for the merits of realism: I am glad to have spent this time with real people, or at least characters modelled after real people. Even criminals, including the ‘criminal’ who made this film, are only human, and it’s only by listening to people that you can hope to understand them: this is the message the filmmaker is trying to impart. It is to Panahi’s credit that he understands that the film is stronger with him listening to conversations instead of starting them. And it is immensely satisfying that we can sit thousands of miles away from where Panahi lives (barred as he is from leaving the country), in a room full of people all listening to these foreigners chat, hearing their stories, their problems, and hoping to understand them better.