Shot digitally, apparently at points with an iPhone, the autobiographical documentary -- about the director's struggle to work under censorship -- was then smuggled to France inside a cake to premiere at Cannes

Publicity still from "Ceci n'est pas un film" / www.allocine.fr

If you didn't know the back story, you might roll your eyes on hearing that French audiences are going nuts over a film that isn't a film. Ceci n'est pas un film (translation: "This is not a film") came out in France last week and is racking up great reviews in the nation's press. This bit of winking protest art, though, isn't French: it's Iranian. And therein lies a lot of the appeal.

This is not the ultra-cute brainchild of effete Western radicals. Ceci n'est pas un film tells the story of Iranian film director Jafar Panahi, who last December was given a six-year jail sentence and banned from filmmaking for 20 years, forbidden to leave the country or give an interview to foreign media. His crime? Anti-regime propaganda, supposedly. Panahi is a supporter of Iran's green movement. As British paper The Guardian noted at the time of the sentencing, Panahi said in September, "When a film-maker does not make films it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail."

Jafar Panahi / Wikimedia

So Panahi made a film -- one whose title coyly mocks the filmmaking ban while also stating truth: this is a film about Panahi waiting for his sentence, unable to film and instead planning out a movie from his living room carpet. Shot digitally, apparently at points with an iPhone, the video was then smuggled to France inside a cake to premiere at Cannes. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, the other credited director, told The New York Times in May that Iranian authorities "had announced that there wouldn't be any Iranian films in the festival. After Cannes announced, I think they were shocked in a way." But if Cannes smarted, imagine the internal reaction to the film opening to the French public, as it did last Wednesday.