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Child pops out of car sunroof in a still from Hit the Road

Iranian family road trip movie wins top prize at London film festival

Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road wins award for ‘distinctive film-making that captures essence of cinema’

A tender and unexpectedly funny story about a family’s road trip through the twisting desert highways and misty green valleys of northwestern Iran has won the most prestigious prize at this year’s London film festival .

Hit the Road, the debut by Panah Panahi – son of esteemed Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi – centres on a family of four making a run for the border, as the father (Hassan Madjooni) struggles with a broken leg, the mother (Pantea Panahiha) laughs when she’s holding back tears, the youngest (Rayan Sarlak) explodes into car karaoke, and the older son (Amin Simiar) remains mysteriously sullen. Nobody mentions where they’re going, but knowledge of their unspoken destination turns despair into affection and eccentric behaviour, all set to the soundtrack of 70s Iranian pop.

Hit the Road centres on a family of four making a run for the border, as the father struggles with a broken leg.

“The best film award recognises inspiring and distinctive film-making that captures the essence of cinema. The essence of life,” said Małgorzata Szumowska, the competition president, whose own film screened at last year’s festival. “At all times in cinema history, but perhaps during a pandemic especially, we are looking for ways to connect to life. Our choice is for a film that made us laugh and cry and feel alive.”

Panahi has said he ran the finished script by his father, who is banned from making films and leaving Iran after he was found guilty of “propaganda against the state”. “The more I think about it, the more I realise that we have always lived with this feeling that we are being watched,” he said. “This is how it’s been for my family, but I’m sure it’s the same for the families of a lot of artists and intellectuals.”

The Sutherland award for first feature film went to Belgian director Laura Wandel’s Playground, the story of seven-year-old Nora’s (Maya Vanderbeque) efforts to help her big brother Abel (Günter Duret) overcome his bullying. Their school, with its own customs, is presented as a microcosm of the wider world’s injustices.

Playground, directed by Laura Wandel, was the winner of the Sutherland award for first feature film.

Isabel Sandoval, the first feature competition president, said Playground was something “everyone can identify with and connect with, and yet has a striking and singular voice, with a courageous commitment to its vision. It has a visceral ability to capture beautifully and clearly how we are shaped by our experiences, and through an insular setting shows us a microcosm for the human condition.”

This year’s BFI London Film Festival included a programme of 159 feature films – including 21 premieres – from around the world. They included Jeymes Samuel’s modern western The Harder They Fall, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter , and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog.

Edith Bowman, Director Jane Campion, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ari Wegner, Tanya Seghatchian, Iain Canning and Roger Frappier attend the awards screening for The Power of the Dog.

Covid restrictions forced the festival into a hybrid model last year , with a significant number of films screened digitally. But festival organisers said that while it had been difficult to plan, it had been an “incredible” year for the festival.

“Not only have we held our own in a pandemic, it really has felt like we have gone up a level, even from our very successful 2019 addition,” said the festival director, Tricia Tuttle. “If one measure of impact is the presence of major international stars, then the megawatt power of opening night with a world premiere of The Harder They Fall with Jay-Z and Beyoncé in attendance kicked us off in great style.”

This year the festival also partnered with the Royal Festival Hall, which became a cultural hub for screenings and talks, and celebrated the addition of TV to its programme, which culminated in the Succession premiere on Friday night.

But the LFF was also criticised for not requiring guests and audiences to have a vaccination passport or proof of a negative Covid test, unlike Cannes, Venice, Toronto and other festivals. “I love both the New York and London film festivals, but the first is showing leadership by requiring all audiences to be vaccinated and the second isn’t, which is disappointing,” tweeted Dave Calhoun, deputy global editor of Time Out.

“We have been really rigorous around Covid protocols in line with both government guidance and other cultural events, and at the time of writing we have had no known cases of Covid at the festival,” Tuttle said at the weekend.

Her team, she added, had factored in “many additional layers of logistic planning, health and safety regulations, alongside some unpredictability and difficulty of international travel … It’s been really rewarding to pull it off and see audiences and industry light up again after the past 18 months.”

Director Liz Garbus received the Grierson award for best documentary for Becoming Cousteau

Other winners this year included Liz Garbus, who received the Grierson award for best documentary for Becoming Cousteau, a fresh take on the life of the inspiring inventor, explorer, environmentalist and film-maker Jacques-Yves Cousteau. According to Kim Longinotto, documentary competition president, it “highlights the most pressing issue of our time – climate change – and urges us all to take action now”.

Duncan Speakman triumphed in the immersive art and XR category for Only Expansion. Love, Dad, a short film exploring film-maker Diana Cam Van Nguyen’s fractured relationship with her father, won the prize for best short film, and Mounia Akl won the audience award for Costa Brava Lebanon.

London film festival 2021
London film festival
World cinema
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Hit the Road

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Watch Hit the Road with a subscription on Paramount+, Showtime, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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A beautifully acted drama with steadily cumulative force, Hit the Road uses one family's journey to make trenchant observations about society as a whole.

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Panah Panahi

Hassan Madjooni

Pantea Panahiha

Rayan Sarlak

Little Brother

Amin Simiar

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“Hit the Road,” Reviewed: A Mysterious and Thrilling Revelation from Iran

By Richard Brody

Mixed emotions reach a peak of political intensity in “Hit the Road,” the Iranian director Panah Panahi’s first feature, and a great one. There’s no way to make any sense of the film without giving away a detail that remains undisclosed until midway through; any substantive discussion of the film entails spoilers. What’s more, the drama depends on this cagey silence, its emotional price, and its political motive. The movie (which opens on April 22nd) involves a family of four on a road trip in an S.U.V.—a journey that is shrouded in mystery and filled with evasive behavior.

“Hit the Road” is a tale of fear and cunning, a thriller of sorts that involves the high risks of a criminal scheme and an intrepid escape. It begins on the dirt shoulder of a highway, where the parents—the father, Khosro (Hasan Majuni), and the unnamed mother (Pantea Panahiha)—are dozing and Farid (Amin Simiar), the elder son and driver, is pacing around outside. Soon, the cell phone belonging to the younger, unnamed son (Rayan Sarlak), who appears to be about seven years old, begins to ring—he’d been forbidden to bring it, and the other family members have left theirs behind, too. The mother confiscates it, removes and destroys the SIM card, and buries the phone in a nearby field, marking the spot with a stone for the return trip. Moments later, back on the highway, the family realizes that they’re being followed, though it turns out to be a false alarm.

The spoilers begin here: the family, as it turns out, is heading toward the border so that Farid can be smuggled out of Iran and start a new life in another country. The motive isn’t clear, but he’s of age to do his two years of mandatory military service, and no Iranian man can apply for a passport without having fulfilled it. A trafficker has arranged the intricately plotted exfiltration at a shockingly high price: the family’s home and car. The paranoid secrecy that pervades the trip entails keeping its purpose from the boy, who is brilliantly imaginative and wildly impulsive. His parents don’t trust him to keep the secret in the presence of whomever they may encounter, and the journey is filled with odd and perilous meetings, including (in the film’s most sharply comedic sequence) a brush with a bike racer who gets a lift from the family after colliding with the S.U.V.

The premise of “Hit the Road” is the effort to circumvent a repressive government’s unjust laws. (Mohammad Rasoulof’s 2020 film “ There Is No Evil ” dramatizes one of the moral dangers that draftees face—namely, the possibility of being ordered to carry out an execution.) Above all, though, the movie is a love story, and a great one—it depicts the passionate bonds of a close family, and Panahi’s view of their love is all the truer and more vital for the acerbity and pugnacious candor of their relationships, the inescapable force of devotion and bonds of commitment amid anger, dismay, disappointment, seething resentment, and stifled incomprehension. The dialogue alone—and the film is a mighty torrent of intimate eloquence—catches the kaleidoscopic array of emotions that flicker and glare through even casual remarks, and the deep foundation of shared experiences on which the family’s every interaction, however minor, is intensified, as on a stage. The presence of the family’s dog, Jessy, whose mortal illness is also being concealed from the boy, adds another poignant touch that’s also a symbolic emblem of looming catastrophe.

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“Hit the Road” is also a tragicomedy, in which the anguish of separation is heightened by the dangers of the journey, leavened by hope for a better future, and balanced by family togetherness. The mother struggles to repress her pain with exaggerated displays of artificial gaiety, including faux-exuberant lip-synching to Iranian pop music, but, in a moment of quiet, she asks Farid not to leave. Khosro, a sharply candid cynic, carps from the back seat, to which he’s relegated by a broken leg in a cast, with observations of penetrating clarity and bitter skepticism. While Khosro, at a rest stop, is speaking by phone with the trafficker about signing over the house, Farid cranks up the volume of a song on the car radio to drown out the discussion, agonizing as it is to hear talk of the sacrifice. Yet, when his mother gets sentimental, he tells her to go home; she responds, “What home, rude boy?” For good measure, she adds, “Shithead.”

The family relationships are depicted through a torrential blend of jovial ribaldry and vulnerable confession, with doubts muttered alone and misgivings kept silent—not least because of the young boy, who’s one of the most irrepressible and exuberant wild cards in the recent cinema. Sarlak’s performance bursts with energy and intelligence, and lends a spontaneity to the elaborate dialogue and fanciful action of this freewheeling and freethinking character, who is still unspoiled in his view of the life ahead and confident of emotional impulses that haven’t yet been clobbered down. He charmingly frets about losing his cell phone lest he miss a call from one Ms. Fakhrai—not the woman of that name, who lives near the family’s home, but her daughter, his peer and friend, whom he intends to marry. His heedlessness risks consequences, as when he draws with a marker on the window of the S.U.V.—which has been borrowed and needs to be returned in pristine condition—or when he calls enthusiastically out the window to a bike racer, resulting in the crash.

The resulting scene, in which the family gives the athlete a lift to a safe haven, offers a philosophical dialogue of rare and giddy delight—about law and obedience and their effect on the inner life—that’s capped with a moment of whiplash irony to match the accident that launched it. The whole sequence is framed like a teeming bit of automotive theatre, in which rapidly ricocheting fine points (including the mother’s subtle, hinted reminder to Khosro not to speak freely) whirl around the practical lessons in political morality that arise. Panahi elevates the tautly dialectical action into grand drama by way of carefully crafted framings that heighten the confined spaces and vast landscapes alike. His visual compositions are essential elements of his world view, whether in a poised side-by-side image of Farid and his mother evoking ineffable love at a rest stop with a discussion of “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” or an unbearable moment of separation that’s ingeniously filmed from hundreds of feet away, with heartbreaking reserve that nonetheless captures both its frantic energy and its poignant intimacy. Panahi’s visual correspondence of elisions and separations replicates the silences and mysteries that mark the characters’ own adventure.

Though “Hit the Road” is the first feature by Panahi, who was born in 1984, it’s merely the first flowering of a life in the cinema: he’s the son of the director Jafar Panahi , whose past decade of work has been undertaken both clandestinely and in defiance of the authorities—and on whose films he has been working in a variety of roles, including that of an editor. In Cahiers du Cinéma , Panah Panahi says that, though he attended film school, “The best film school was at home, where all the conversations revolved around cinema and where all the soirées were full of movie people.” Jafar Panahi was arrested in 2010 on political charges; he has been making films while enduring house arrest, a suspended prison sentence, and an official ban on filmmaking. (Khosro’s limited movement with a cast on his leg is a remarkable symbol of the limits placed on the elder filmmaker.) Panah Panahi’s work, while very much in the vein of Jafar’s, extends its reach, dramatically and thematically, for another generation. The modern Iranian cinema was launched into international prominence, about thirty years ago, by the films of Abbas Kiarostami ; Jafar Panahi was his assistant. Kiarostami’s films are marked by a passionately attentive, documentary-like detail, rooted in aspects of Iranian life that are largely banned from the screen—a symbolic cinema that disguises its symbols in local and practical details.

“Hit the Road” extends that lineage, as a work of practical realism that stands as a manifesto for the imaginative power of observation and for the political power of the imagination. The action breaks away from the modern highway into the deep country, from the modern state into the wild, as the family approaches the border by driving on a dirt road. (“Dirt Road” is the literal translation of the movie’s Farsi title.) An interaction with a shepherd that takes place in a kind of spoken code, the terrifying arrival of a masked motorcyclist, and the shocking vision of a gathering, in the wild, of families of other so-called “travellers” evoke an alternative, outlaw society of danger and hope. Panahi marks it at the limits of fantasy, in text and in vision alike, as Khosro and the young boy link the family’s travels to a discussion about the Batmobile, matched by fantasy images that project father and son together, flying into outer space.

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‘Hit the Road’ Review: An Iranian Family Makes a Run for the Border in Panah Panahi’s Unforgettable Debut

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 New York Film Festival. Kino Lorber releases the film in theaters on Friday, April 22.

A family road trip movie in which we never quite know where the film is heading (and are often lied to about why), “Hit the Road” may be set amid the winding desert highways and gorgeous emerald valleys of northwestern Iran, but Panah Panahi’s miraculous debut is fueled by the growing suspicion that its characters have taken a major detour away from our mortal coil at some point along the way. “Where are we?” the gray-haired mom (Pantea Panahiha) asks into the camera upon waking up from a restless catnap inside the SUV in which so much of this film takes place. “We’re dead,” squeaks the youngest of her two sons (Rayan Sarlak) from the back seat, the six-year-old boy already exuding some of the most anarchic movie kid energy this side of “The Tin Drum.”

They aren’t dead — at least not literally, even if the adorable stray dog who’s come along for the ride seems to be on its last legs — but the further Panahi’s foursome drives away from the lives they’ve left behind in Tehran, the more it begins to seem as if they’ve left behind life itself. A purgatorial fog rolls in as they climb towards the Turkish border, and with it comes a series of semi-competent guides (one amusingly trying to steer a motorbike from behind a sheepskin balaclava) who show up to give the family vague directions as if they were clueless interns for the ferryman on the river Styx. A cosmic pall starts to shadow every scene, the characters growing further and further away from us with every long shot until they’re (literally) sucked into the shimmering abyss of outer space.

We may never know why Khosro (Hassan Madjooni) and his wife so urgently fled their home in order to smuggle 20-year-old Farid (Amin Simiar) out of the country and away from the autocratic government their introverted first-born kid must have offended somehow, but it’s clear that this family is speeding down a one-way street. “We lost our house and we sold our car for him to be able to leave,” one parent cries to the other. “Do you ever think of the future?” And yet it’s the past that’s being forfeited to pay for it. Later, the little boy will take stock of the situation and ask his dad if they’re cockroaches. “We are now,” Khosro grunts in response, most of his attention focused on the metal wire he’s using to scratch at the toes sticking out of his leg cast.

So it goes in a beautifully tender comedy that tears your heart in half with a featherlight touch — a film that swerves between tragedy and gallows humor with the expert control of a stunt driver, and knowingly sabotages all of its most crushing moments with a deadpan joke in order to keep Khosro’s family from running out of gas. “Hit the Road” is a story about people who have to laugh in order to stop themselves from crying, and Panahi commits to that dynamic with the unwavering dedication of someone who knows that his characters don’t have any other choice.

Considering that Panah Panahi is the son of the great filmmaker Jafar Panahi (still banned from making movies or leaving the country), and that the late Abbas Kiarostami was something more than a mentor to him, his feature debut would seem to follow in the formally inventive but aesthetically naturalistic tradition of the Iranian cinema that raised him. All the more so because masterworks like “Taxi,” “A Taste of Cherry,” and even the Japan-shot “Like Someone in Love” relied on cars for their unique ability to navigate the liminal interstate between public and private spaces. And yet, for all of the familiar ingredients that Panahi stirs into the mix — the subtle flourishes of self-reflexivity, his father’s dry sense of humor and broad political rebelliousness, Kiarostami’s penchant for staging critical dramatic moments in ultra-wide long shots — “Hit the Road” is the work of a filmmaker in full command of their own voice.

Some of that is owed to Panahi’s sly visual style and millennial reference points (a running joke about “Batman Begins” complements a more ruminative discussion of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and later a climactic “dubsmash,” if Instagram dads are still using that term), but so much of his movie’s unique character stems from the characters themselves. The sullen and vulnerable Farid — whose bid to escape Iran drives this elliptical story — is perhaps the only member of his family who doesn’t make an indelible mark.

Panahiha’s turn as a mother in crisis is alternately playful and wrenching; one portrait shot of her camouflaged against the mists of time is enough to singe this entire film into your memory. Madjoon’s curmudgeonly take on Khosro is the kind of thing that seems like it could spiral into sitcom caricature at any moment (“I fell down,” he groans when someone asks how he hurt his leg. “From grace”), but his hobbling brand of hopelessness stems from a deep well of paternal heartache. “You and your brother are ruining me,” he tells his “little fart” of a youngest child, as if trying to pretend that this whole movie isn’t a profound act of love.

Maybe he doesn’t want to let Farid know how much his family is sacrificing for him, or maybe Khosro just doesn’t want to admit it to himself. There was ample room for Panahi to shine more light onto that uncertainty in a 93-minute film that only loses momentum when it tips into vagueness, but what difference would it have made in the end? Khosro’s choice is already made for him. It’s telling that our only clear insight into his mind comes during a monologue he delivers flat on his back and half out of his head, his youngest son lying flat across his stomach and moving up and down with each weary breath.

That little twerp is another thing Panahi lifts from his dad and the broader tradition of Iranian cinema: The hyper-cute, transcendently annoying kid whose true nature is so irrepressible that he becomes a mirror capable of reflecting the deepest truths of the world around him. Not only does Simiar deliver one of the most well-calibrated child performances you’ll ever witness, his rascally innocence (and related confusion over Farid’s impending “marriage”) also provides a perfect counterweight to the unbearable heaviness that follows his family all the way to the Turkish border. His screechy voice blunts the solemness out of every terrible silence, a tendency that pays off a hundred times over during a tragicomic sequence that Panahi captures in a diorama-like ultra-wide shot; squint and you can see the boy’s tiny silhouette tied to a tree in the distance, flailing against the fates as his mother makes a deal with the devil on the far side of the frame.

It’s a moment that crystallizes how “Hit the Road” is at its best when simultaneously operating in two different gears. The agony of loss is offset by the raw energy of life, the specific details of Farid’s escape dovetail with the universal heartache of surrendering a child to the adult world, and the dolorous tones of a twinkling piano become roadkill for — in the words of a little boy sticking his entire upper body out of an SUV’s sunroof as it speeds across the desert flats — “BLISS!!!” You’ll know how he feels, even if that feeling crushes down on you with a weight that Simiar’s character won’t have to bear until he’s older. “Whenever you see a cockroach,” his dad puts it at one point, “remember that his parents sent him out into the world with lots of hope.”

“Hit the Road” screened at the 2021 New York Film Festival. Kino Lorber will release it in the United States in early 2022.

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‘Hit the Road’ Review: Wheels Within Wheels

A family trip is the occasion for humor and heartbreak in Panah Panahi’s debut feature.

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By A.O. Scott

Dad is grumbling in the back seat, which he shares with his motormouth 6-year-old son. The two of them mock and provoke each other like a vaudeville double act, with an element of physical comedy provided by the cast on the father’s leg, which limits his movements and sours his mood. The peanut gallery, up front, consists of the older brother, who is driving, and his mother, who is wittier than her husband but less of a show-off.

The four of them enjoy getting on one another’s nerves, which is part of what makes them a family. All in all, they are good company. In real life, you might not want to be stuffed into a car with these people — and let’s not forget their dog, Jesse — on a dusty stretch of Iranian highway, but from the first jokey moments of “Hit the Road” until its heartbreaking end you will not want to be anywhere else.

Not that this film, the first feature directed by Panah Panahi, is exactly “Little Miss Sunshine.” The reasons for the trip emerge slowly, as do the hints of anxiety and sorrow that creep into the good-natured banter. The family members have all agreed to leave their cellphones behind (though not all of them have done so), and they worry about being followed. Their vehicle, a beige S.U.V., is borrowed. Property has been sold and favors called in. This isn’t a vacation.

The older son must leave the country. We don’t know why, but we can infer that the alternatives are grim. He and his parents try to keep this information from the younger boy, who is told that his brother is going off to get married. It’s not clear that he believes this, but he is protected by the blissful narcissism of childhood as well as the warmth and patience of his mother and father.

The destination is a remote, rural border area, where other families in similar circumstances are camped out, making the best of a sad, uncertain situation. Panahi, whose father, Jafar Panahi , is one of Iran’s leading filmmakers, has a storytelling style that is at once clear and elusive. The personalities of the four people in the car are strong and distinct; you’re on familiar terms with them even before you learn their names.

But they’re also mysterious, and not only because basic questions — Where do they live? What do they do for a living? How did their trouble start? — remain unanswered. The more time you spend with them, the more complicated each of them becomes, and the more you feel the weight and strength of the bonds that connect them. Hassan Madjooni, who plays the father, is a large, saturnine presence with a special kind of charisma. Hobbled by his leg injury and humbled by age, the character hides a large, tender heart behind a scrim of sarcasm. His wife (the remarkable Pantea Panahiha) clearly has long practice in dealing with his moods and deflecting his darts. The older son (Amin Simiar) is an introvert; his brother (a serial scene stealer named Rayan Sarlak) is very much the opposite.

Family life, on the road or off, often involves competition for space. Everyone needs both emotional support and room to breathe, and nobody gets everything they want. That much is normal. What makes “Hit the Road” so memorable and devastating is the way it explores normal life under duress. An unseen, oppressive force — presumably some aspect of the government that has harassed Panahi’s father for more than a decade and tried to prevent him from making films — imposes its will on them. That invisible cruelty makes the tenderness and good humor of this movie all the more precious, and almost unbearable.

Hit the Road Not rated. In Persian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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‘Hit the Road’ Review: Several Stars Are Born in an Irresistible Iranian Road-Movie Debut

Director Panah Panahi and a superb cast burst onto the scene in a debut honoring its Iranian forbears while thrumming with its own energy.

By Jessica Kiang

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With a touch on the pedal so light you don’t even feel the woosh, Panah Panahi, son of Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, goes instantaneously from zero to 60 with his debut feature, “ Hit the Road .” Doubly surprising, he does it repeatedly within the film too, from scene to scene — and within scenes, from moment to moment — accelerating and decelerating so abruptly, switching moods like gears, like radio stations, that by the end we should be rattling around inside, carsick, dying to get out. Instead, its 93 minutes whip by so airily, it’s possible not to realize how much you’ve learned to love the family whose road trip you’ve shared in, until the credits roll and you immediately start to miss them.

“Hit the Road,” again like its director, works from a standing start. The car — which we learn is a borrowed vehicle — has pulled in by the side of the road while its occupants rest and its driver stretches. We can’t know it yet, but there is subtle foreshadowing in who is inside the car, dozing or drowsing, and who is outside, looking in, drumming fingers on the rear window at the family dog, watching the others with an unreadable but notably tender expression. Arranged and observed like this, it feels like the kind of nothing moment that springs to mind in times of homesickness, as opposed to any more considered or rehearsed farewell, such as the one in which, as we presently learn, this journey is meant to end.

We don’t get to know these characters by name so much as by their relative positions within the family constellation, and within the car. Up front, we have Mom (Pantea Panahiha), perhaps the clan’s pole star, though also the most demonstrative and expressive character, with moods that pass across her lovely face like changing landscapes. Beside her sits her elder son (Amin Simiar), pensive and quiet, except in one beautifully observed conversation with his shaggy, bearlike Dad (Hassan Madjooni), who sits in the back with his right leg in a tatty cast sticking through the gap between the front seats. Ostensibly beside him, but really pinging around the car like a pinball is the younger son (instant superstar Rayan Sarlak), nicknamed “Monkey the Second” by Dad, whose irrepressible, bendy, explosive energy gives the film its anarchic spirit. And right in the back, there’s Jessy, the family dog, whose late-stage illness is one of the secrets being kept from the little boy.

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Another secret, only ever partially revealed, is the actual reason for the journey, which is a melancholy and perhaps even dangerous one, that justifies Mom’s fear at one point that they are being followed — paranoia further borne out when the messenger they’ve arranged to meet turns out to be a horror-movie-style motorcyclist wearing a crudely fashioned burlap sack as a mask. But the younger boy punctures the fearfulness of the encounter by cheerily observing how he looks like The Scarecrow from the Batman films, just as later, at a moment of maximal potential sorrow, he will look up at us directly and with absurdly perfect rhythm, lip sync to the crooning strains of an old Iranian pop song.

Movie and pop love is evident throughout “Hit the Road.” Dad is reduced to helpless gales of laughter imagining the drop in resale value on a scratched Batmobile. “2001: A Space Odyssey” crops up directly and then obliquely, in a lovely surreal flourish when, wrapped in a foil sleeping bag while tinkling music plays stars into being on the grass all around, suddenly Dad and child are not father and son but astronaut and star-child, lashed together but lost in space. It’s an overtly magical moment, but Amin Jafari’s unobtrusively gorgeous camerawork can find wonder in much more prosaic scenes too.

But then, there is lovely concert here between all the departments, orchestrated by Panahi so that editors Ashkan Mehri and Amir Etminan are sometimes expressively restrained, as when one of Jafari’s long takes curls around the interior space taking in several of those spectacular hairpin shifts in Panahiha’s performance, as Mom goes from laughter to tears to shouts of exultation to grimaces of pain, a bravura actor’s exercise that never feels like one. And the editing can also be bold, as when a long, grief-stricken glance between Mom and Dad snaps like the end of a hypnosis spell into an unbelievably joyous shot of Monkey the Second with his head out of the sun roof as the car speeds across a cracked desert.

Shades of Panahi Sr. exist in the film’s loopy humor. Abbas Kiarostami, for whom Pahani fils worked as assistant, hovers fondly in the dazzling, often heartbreaking use of extreme wide shots. Both these Iranian elders are known for their car-based filmmaking. And yet, like this extraordinary, ordinary family, latticed together by love yet supremely alive in their own individual hearts, Panah Panahi is not just part of a tradition, but his own filmmaker, finding new resonances in territory so familiar its power to surprise should have been thoroughly exhausted by now, but that here feels like a whole new universe.

Reviewed in Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight), July 17, 2021. Running time: 93 MIN.

Production: (Iran) A Panah Panahi production. (International Sales: Celluloid Dreams, Paris). Producers: Panah Panahi, Mastaneh Mohajer.
Crew: Director, writer: Panah Panahi. Camera: Amin Jafari. Editors: Ashkan Mehri, Amir Etminan. Music: Payman Yazdanian.
With: Hassan Madjooni, Pantea Panahiha, Rayan Sarlak, Amin Simiar. (Farsi dialogue)

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Review: An Iranian filmmaking scion charts his own path with whimsical ‘Hit the Road’

A child raises his arms in delight from a car's sun roof in the movie “Hit the Road.”

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Iranian cinema in all its poetic humanity is on lovely display in Panah Panahi’s “Hit the Road,” a charmingly offbeat, meaningful journey across remote spaces (and at one point, fantastically, into space itself) that follows a tight-knit Tehran family of four entering unfamiliar territory.

It’s tempting to consider Panahi’s feature debut in some hereditary through line with the pointedly sociopolitical, realist work of his father, state-targeted filmmaker Jafar Panahi ( “Offside,” “3 Faces” ), who is still under a 20-year ban from filmmaking inside Iran. But that inkling is appealingly thwarted at every turn by how assured the whimsical, heartfelt “Hit the Road” is in mapping its own artistic path of humor and sorrow, images and sound, and keenly observed detail mixed with the unexplained.

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The opening scene, starting with a shot from inside the family’s mini-SUV on the side of a lonely highway, is one such subtle signal of Panahi’s conscious independence from expected comparisons. The parents doze in their seats. In the back seat, their younger boy (Rayan Sarlak) pretend-plays on drawn piano keys that decorate the leg cast of his dad (Hassan Madjooni), his fingering matching the Schubert sonata we hear. The older son (Amin Simiar) is outside, wandering the perimeter of the car, stopping to look in forlornly at his mother (Pantea Panahiha). He then turns to gaze at the horizon — what lies ahead?

The quiet is interrupted by the awakened mom’s fear that their little one has, contrary to her wishes, smuggled a cellphone on the trip. The boy’s impish defiance, coupled with the weary father’s wry handling of it, kick-starts the movie’s delightful strain of rambunctious-kid comedy. But the driving son’s generally tense demeanor and the mother’s anxious and sentimental preoccupations — no phones, suspicious cars, family mementos, lip-synching to beloved pre-revolution pop songs — indicate this is no ordinary trip for these unnamed characters.

Eventually it’s made clear that they’re headed to the border, where the older brother is to be spirited out of Iran illegally. This fraught mission — one that must cross the mind of everyone suffering under Iran’s brand of authoritarian rule — is less an engine of typical narrative suspense, however, and more a dramatic construct so Panahi can paint a picture of family dynamics when colored by the most heartbreaking kind of urgent togetherness.

What transpires is an exquisitely controlled yet diverting blend of pre-mourning and in-the-moment pleasures, a tonal blend of miraculous balance for a first-time filmmaker, even one with Panahi’s one-of-a-kind training. (He also apprenticed with Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami .) And as the landscape changes from dry, dusty flatness to mist-covered mountain passes, Panahi’s depth-conscious framing of his characters against nature and Amin Jafari’s crisp, dreamlike cinematography shift the atmosphere further, to something almost otherworldly. In one aforementioned instance, Panahi leaves earth entirely (with the help of some gently applied visual effects), and yet you grasp immediately how and why he’s earned this sweet, somber drift from reality.

The performances are uniformly perfect, too, from mini-maestro of puckishness Sarlak (what a child actor!) to the magnetic swirl of maternal strength and vulnerability that is Panahiha, who has one poignant moment to herself so delicate you can practically feel the breeze that draws a smile. The men, meanwhile, do their best to present a stern front, but in a comically halting exchange between Madjooni’s gruff, wisdom-imparting dad and Simiar’s apprehensive firstborn, against an impossibly scenic backdrop, the awkwardness is touching.

“Who is the traveler?” barks one of the intimidating, sheepskin-hooded motorcyclists facilitating this family’s expensive, emotional act of sacrifice and love for their grown son. What “Hit the Road” helps us realize is that they all are, of course, and to be a passenger alongside these nervous voyagers, as they clash, tease and cherish each other on the way to this strange and terrible fork in their lives, is to be a very fortunate moviegoer indeed.

'Hit the Road'

In Persian with English subtitles Not rated Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes Playing: Starts May 6, Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles; Laemmle Town Center 5, Encino

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Hit the Road: Iranian family road trip film is a worthy inheritor of the mantle of Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami

A young boy wearing a patterned red, white and black sweater is standing through a car sun roof, arms spread and yelling in joy.

Panah Panahi's deceptively breezy road movie opens with the mournful strains of a Schubert sonata. A young boy mimes along with each note, bent over piano keys drawn onto an amply decorated leg cast, revealed by the gently drifting camera to belong to his dozing father.

Mother stands outside an idle car while her son is leaning his head out, backwards from the window.

The initial image – slightly disorienting, with the cast a strange, log-like shape dominating the frame – hints at the playful nature of the would-be pianist (Rayan Sarlak, a real livewire), but also at the deception that underpins this family road trip. (Why are no mobile phones allowed? Why are they in a borrowed car? And why is Farid, the elder son played by Amin Simiar, so tight-lipped?)

A deceptive bent also characterises the cinema of the Iranian New Wave, which Panahi's feature debut extends. The films of the 'new wave' that emerged in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution offered neo-realism warped by slippery, self-reflexive elements that made it hard to distinguish between documentary and fiction: filmmakers like the late Abbas Kiarostami and his protégé Jafar Panahi — father of Hit the Road's writer-director — sometimes play versions of themselves on screen, visibly nudging the action along.

A father and adult son are sitting chatting on some rocks by a river with dry rocky mountains in the background.

Social commentary in Kiarostami's films tended to be subtle, coded so as to elude intervention by censorial hands. Panahi senior, less so: his work has seen him arrested and, in 2010, imprisoned on the charge of making propaganda against the Islamic Republic. (He was arrested again in July of this year, this time simply for making inquiries into the incarceration of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad.)

A young boy leaning on his fathers leg cast which has pen drawings on it, he touches a keyboard drawing.

"There are realities they don't want shown," Panahi tells his niece in Taxi (2015), alluding to the concept of Siahnamayi (literally, "portraying in black"), brandished by conservative Iranian critics at films that dare explore the injustices of contemporary life in the authoritarian nation.

Like the two films that preceded it (2011's This Is Not a Film and 2013's Closed Curtain), Taxi, a docufiction comprised of Panahi's conversations with the passengers he picks up while posing as a share taxi driver in Tehran, was made in secret, in defiance of the 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed on Panahi in 2010.

He again took up a driver's seat for his most recent feature, 3 Faces (2018), in which he and his friend Behnaz Jafari, a well-known Iranian actor, embarked on a (fictional) journey to the country's rural north-west in search of a young woman whose family are preventing her from attending drama school.

Hit the Road demonstrates that the younger Panahi – who worked as an editor on 3 Faces – takes after his insubordinate dad: the film is also a rambling, philosophically skewed rescue mission with a political subtext, though it's destined to conclude with a sorrowful farewell rather than a retrieval.

Father, mother and child sit on bench, mother smiling at camera, child leaning back and father leaning on crutches.

"Where are we?" asks the unnamed mother (Pantea Panahiha, stately and soulful) in the opening scene, blinking awake in the front seat of the car. "We're dead," comes the (also unnamed) kid's mock-solemn reply. (And the film's ensuing dialogue would suggest that gallows humour is a hereditary trait.)

While the boy is rather overstating the case, there's certainly a purgatorial feeling to the journey they're on.

As the landscape changes from parched camel-coloured hills to green ones and the dust gives way to mist, the mood in the car ratchets up in intensity, and the glances between the adults – mother, Mohammad Hassan Madjooni's hobbled father, and Farid – seem to acquire new and heavy layers of meaning. Only the youngest family member squirms and chatters freely, his chaotic ebullience providing them with some necessary distraction.

Mother sits beside older son as she puts a cigarette in his mouth.

The close-up intimacy of the car trip is countered by cinematographer Amin Jafari's penchant for holding on sweeping, wide-angled exteriors, in which human figures – and their problems – lose their typically privileged place in the frame. An affinity for distance and stillness is characteristic of the Iranian New Wave, and helps to imbue its films with their meditative quality.

Hit the Road is less meta than much of this canon, however. Panahi's story-world is punctured only by a direct-to-camera lip-sync sequence that comes towards the end, set to one of the film's several invigorating rushes of old Iranian pop: "My dear kin, my tribesman, / you are riding the horse of exile / so proudly," mouths the littlest family member passionately, though he cannot yet comprehend the sentiment.

The surrealist touches that infiltrate the film's latter section – a bedtime story set against the backdrop of the night sky, with father, bundled into a reflective sleeping bag suit, appearing as a novelty-size star; a shot that speeds across the desert towards the horizon in homage to the tripped-out space-travel sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Farid's favourite film – point towards a new dimension of the cinematic sensibility passed onto Panahi.

A child points at cascading mountains as his mother kneels beside him.

But this is no calculated formal exercise. There is warmth, however bittersweet, and great tenderness in this portrait of a family knowingly charting a course for an unwanted and risky separation – this depth of feeling all too easily traced back to Panahi's own experience of a family imperilled.

Hit the Road is in cinemas now.

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Hit the Road

Follows a chaotic, tender family that is on a road trip across a rugged landscape and fussing over the sick dog and getting on each others' nerves. Only the mysterious older brother is quiet... Read all Follows a chaotic, tender family that is on a road trip across a rugged landscape and fussing over the sick dog and getting on each others' nerves. Only the mysterious older brother is quiet. Follows a chaotic, tender family that is on a road trip across a rugged landscape and fussing over the sick dog and getting on each others' nerves. Only the mysterious older brother is quiet.

Panah Panahi
Pantea Panahiha
Mohammad Hassan Madjooni
Rayan Sarlak
31 User reviews
103 Critic reviews
91 Metascore
11 wins & 16 nominations

Little Brother
Big Brother
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Soundtracks Piano Sonata No.20 in A major D.959, II Andantino Written by Franz Schubert Performed by Paul Lewis

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May 17, 2022
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March 4, 2022 (Sweden)
Jaddeh Khaki
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Apr 24, 2022

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“Where are we?”

The masterful “Hit the Road,” writer/director Panah Panahi ’s elegiac feature debut that traces a family on a mysterious road trip somewhere rural outside of Tehran, starts with this question. It’s asked by the story’s unnamed Mom, played introspectively by the great Pantea Panahiha . “We’re dead,” cheerily responds her younger son ( Rayan Sarlak ), the film’s impossibly cute, wide-eyed and long-lashed six-year-old trickster, drawing plenty of awws and belly laughs whenever he opens his know-it-all mouth or pulls a funny schtick, like hiding his dad’s cell phone.

Though when the kid first makes this intense quip, we aren’t quite acquainted with the rascal’s irresistibly witty ways yet, a disposition that often injects the picture with moments of comic relief that runs parallel to the movie’s melancholy. And Panahi is so precise behind the camera that his inspired compositions of the family inside the car—somehow, both spacious and claustrophobic—as well as the languorous rays of sun that shoot their way into the confinement dreamily, don’t necessarily challenge the little one’s otherworldly remark, very much on purpose. That being said, you may be forgiven to think that you’re in the presence of a mystic, spiritual or even supernatural “ Little Miss Sunshine ” for a second there, one that is set on the road to the Pearly Gates.

But Panahi is also quick to gracefully steer you back into reality. No, no one is dead amongst the family of four—also including Hassan Madjooni ’s wisely deadpan Dad with a broken, painfully itchy leg in a cast and the pensive, twentysomething Big Brother, played by Amin Simiar . They are just in somewhat of a disorienting rush—as we find out in doses, the quartet is making a dash for the Turkish border to smuggle the older son out of the country for reasons Panahi smartly leaves mostly unexplained, a perceptive decision that propels the alluring aura of secrecy in “Hit the Road.”

In strictly speculative terms, the filmmaker’s choice to leave things unsaid might have something to do with the Panahi name. Yes, Panah is the son of the legendary Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi , who is still barred from filmmaking and departing Iran due to the regime’s enraging 2010 ruling that found J. Panahi guilty of spreading anti-government propaganda. (Thankfully, that didn’t stop him from making unofficial movies without permits, like masterpieces “This Is Not A Film” and “Taxi.”) In that regard, it might very well be in a subconsciously protective spirit that his son Panah leaves story’s political facets obscure, knowing what buttons he can and cannot push, what he can and cannot spell out. But that doesn’t mean “Hit The Road” is a coy version of something that could have been superior if it were more obvious. Far from it. By concealing some of the nitty-gritty, Panahi makes an even more fiercely political point throughout “Hit The Road.” Here, the details don’t matter as much as their heartbreaking consequences: the irreversibly burdened families unfairly torn away from their loved ones, and a society that carries those scars.

Undoubtedly a disciple of both the Father Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami , the late Iranian master who has been deeply influential in his life (there are noticeable traces of “ Taste of Cherry ” here), Panahi organically laces “Hit The Road” with interludes of sharp humor and casual contemplation. Furthermore, he intertwines the family’s predicaments (the root of which is hidden from the young son also) with that of the country they dwell in. What’s most astonishing is the sense of freedom Panahi generates by simply capturing the love and commitment among the four. If somehow the sacrifice the parents are making for their offspring and the personal risk they gladly assume isn’t already enough evidence of their mutual unconditional affection, keep a close eye on everyone’s body language. The way the young son curls up on his dad’s torso, the genuine temperament in which the mom sings to her older son to cheer him up, the way they all bond around conversations trivial and weighty. Under Panahi’s baton and through cinematographer Amin Jafari ’s naturalistic lens, it all unfolds so effortlessly that you sometimes forget their mission, and think they’re perhaps on vacation.

But despite all the exuberant Iranian ballads we get to hear over the course of “Hit The Road” (apparently, all pre-revolution songs that today’s administration frowns upon, according to Panahi), this isn’t an inherently blissful yarn, as the mournful keys of a Schubert piece remind us throughout. For every laugh the family lets out, for each merry chance encounter they experience—like an oddly hysterical one with a Lance Armstrong-loving cyclist—there are tears shed in secret, cagey deals made in the shadows and the impending separation they inch closer to with every passing moment. Still, Panahi doesn’t abandon his sense of hope or humor in the final stretch. By the border, under twinkly stars that defy the pitch-black skies, he winks at the audience with a magical, low-key Kubrickian cosmic scene that centers the film on the innocence of the young child. It’s an unforgettable parting note by a filmmaker that both honors his father’s ongoing legacy, and inaugurates his unique, very own voice.

Now playing in select theaters.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Film credits.

Hit the Road (2022)

Hassan Madjooni as Dad

Pantea Panahiha as Mom

Rayan Sarlak as Little Brother

Amin Simiar as Big Brother

Panah Panahi

Cinematographer

Amin Jafari
Ashkan Mehri
Amir Etminan
Peyman Yazdanian

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Panah Panahi's Cannes Favorite 'Hit the Road' Official US Trailer

by Alex Billington March 1, 2022 Source: YouTube

"One day, we'll laugh at all this." Kino Lorber has revealed an official trailer for Hit the Road , an award-winning, outstanding little indie film from Iran. It's the feature debut of filmmaker Panah Panahi, who just so happens to be the son of acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi . This premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival last year in the Director's Fortnight section and ended up with tons of rave reviews ( one of my favorites of the fest ). The film follows a chaotic, tender Iranian family that has embarked upon a a road trip across a rugged landscape and fussing over the sick dog and getting on each others' nerves along the way. Only the mysterious older brother is quiet, as he is headed somewhere else. Panah Panahi "makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama." The film stars Pantea Panahiha , Hasan Majuni , Rayan Sarlak , and Amin Simiar . This is one of the best international films from last year that everyone must see when they get a chance. Don't miss it - highly recommend watching.

Here's the official US trailer (+ two posters) for Panah Panahi's Hit the Road , direct from YouTube :

Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four – two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult, the other an ebullient six-year-old – as they drive across the Iranian countryside. Over the course of the trip, they bond over memories of the past, grapple with fears of the unknown, and fuss over their sick dog. Unspoken tensions arise and the film builds emotional momentum as it slowly reveals the furtive purpose for their journey. The result is a humanist drama that offers an authentic, raw, and deeply sincere observation of an Iranian family preparing to part with one of their own. Hit the Road , also known as Jaddeh Khaki in Iran, is both written and directed by young Iranian filmmaker Panah Panahi , who is also the son of the acclaimed filmmaker Jafar Panahi, making his feature directorial debut with this. It first premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival playing in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar, and also played at NYFF & London. Kino Lorber will debut Hit the Road in select US theaters starting April 22nd, 2022 this spring. Who's in?

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Hit the Road

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Pantea Panahiha

Mohammad Hassan Madjooni

Rayan Sarlak

Little Brother

Amin Simiar

Big Brother

Masoud Tosifyan

Average 8.2

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Hit the Road

4 out of 5 stars
Recommended

an excited young boy in a chunky knit sweater hands out the sun roof of a car

Time Out says

Iranian filmmaker Panah Panahi’s road trip movie is a bittersweet answer to Little Miss Sunshine

Parked in a dusty layby, a father and his young son squabble playfully over a cell phone in the languid, sun-baked opening moments of Iranian director Panah Panahi’s striking debut. The family dog sits in the back of their SUV; the eldest son remains quiet behind the wheel. Mum sits next to him, weighed down by something or other. This is our entry point to a road trip movie with an aching heart and a slow accretion of revelations ahead of it – a drama that leaves the dramatics for later and is all the more powerful for it. For anyone who has spent hours cooped up in a car with their family – which is all of us – even Hit the Road ’s slower stretches will have a wry relatability. The radio is fiddled with; songs are sung; pit stops are made; and dad (Hassan Madjooni), who has a never-explained broken leg, nearly gets another one trying to retrieve a crumpled can from the highway. It’s like Little Miss Sunshine in a 30mph zone.

But Hit the Road will eventually reveal why that phone must remain in dad’s iron grip, and why both the family’s pet pooch and its sullen elder son (Amin Simiar) are so muted – and none of those reasons are good. Somewhere buried deep within Hit the Road is a critique of Iranian society that suggests Panahi is a chip off the old block – his dad, Jafar Panahi (‘The White Balloon’), remains under house arrest in Iran, supposedly for making ‘propaganda’ against the state – while the Abbas Kiarostami’s self-reflexive studies of life in the country (often set in cars) find an echo here, too.

But the younger Panahi has his own voice – and a gift for wry humour. A tangle with a cyclist mid-race sees the biker hitching a ride for a few miles, sharing his admiration for Lance Armstrong as they drive past his rivals. But Armstrong was a cheat, dad tells the crestfallen man, who tries valiantly to defend his disgraced American hero. A moment later he’s hopping out and resuming the race at the head of the field, the irony completely lost on him. Dad, meanwhile, is loving every moment.

But the mood shifts as a sadness seeps through the later stretches of the film. Pahani’s goal is to get the audience as close as possible to the family and its burden, and he achieves it via long, lulling takes and fourth-wall-breaking looks into – or, maybe, through – the camera. Beyond the bickering and jokes, they seem to be asking: how could you not be moved by what we’re going through? The acting is note perfect across the board: six-year-old Rayan Sarlak is an effervescent explosion of rascally energy, while Madjooni is funny, laconic and pissed-off – often all at once. Of the four leads, only Pantea Panahiha – the mother – has a significant body of screen work behind her, but you’d never know. You’d never know that the director is a first-timer either. Together they’ve created something completely fresh with the skill of veterans.

In UK cinemas Jul 29.

Cast and crew

Director: Panah Panahi
Screenwriter: Panah Panahi
Hassan Madjooni
Pantea Panahiha
Rayan Sarlak
Amin Simiar

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Hit the Road

Hit the Road . Courtesy of Celluloid Dreams.

Panah Panahi
Persian with English subtitles

The son of acclaimed, embattled Iranian master filmmaker Jafar Panahi, and co-editor of his father’s 3 Faces (NYFF56), makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and ultimately deeply moving comic drama. Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. With a tone that’s satisfyingly hard to pin down, Panahi follows a family of four—two middle-aged parents and their two sons, one a taciturn adult, the other a garrulous, hyperactive 6-year-old—as they drive across the Iranian countryside. Rather than rely on an episodic structure built around external encounters, Panahi keeps the focus on the psychological dynamics inside the car and at various stops along the way. The result is a film that gradually builds emotional momentum as it reveals the furtive purpose for their journey, and swings from comedy to tragedy en route with dexterity and force. A Kino Lorber release.

Support generously provided by: Centre National du Cinéma et de L’Image Animée (CNC) Cultural Services of the French Embassy UniFrance

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‘Hit the Road’ Is the Quiet, Low-Key Masterpiece of the Year

By David Fear

You are dropped into the middle of a journey. It’s unclear where exactly you’re going, at least at first. Still, a few early signposts suggest possible destinations: precocious-kid comedy, existential-crisis drama, Ransom of Red Chief -type ironyfest, paranoid thriller, regional road-to-nowhere allegory. You start to pick up that it’s a family you’re traveling with, a foursome who fit easily into familiar slots. Dad (Hasan Mujuni) is cranky, bearded, partially crippled by having his leg in a cast. Mom (Pantea Panahiha) is fretful, slightly fussy, extremely nurturing — possibly, it’s hinted, to a fault. Their oldest son (Amin Simiar) is in his early twenties, quiet and a little bookish; he’s the one driving the car. Their youngest (Rayan Sarlak) is somewhere between the ages of six to eight, and is a cross between Home Alone -era Macaulay Culkin and the Tasmanian Devil. A stray dog they’ve picked up, Jessy, is napping in the back.

Their affectionate banter and a few impromptu sing-alongs to old musical numbers give the impression that we’re riding shotgun on a relaxing, family-bonding getaway. A contraband cellphone, quickly confiscated by Mom and buried at the foot of some mountains by the side of a highway, suggests something else is behind this trip. Ditto a sense that someone may be following them. Not far along into the drive, the older brother erupts over his parents “trying to have a last-gasp party.” Worried glances are exchanged. The boy seems especially concerned. “In movies, when they say ‘last-gasp,'” he exclaims, “they mean something bad.” The kid’s not quite 100-percent on the money. But he’s not completely off the mark, either.

There’s more than one voyage happening with these domestic road warriors, in other words, and part of the joy of Hit the Road is submitting semi-blindly to wherever it takes you. (It opened in New York/L.A. on April 22nd, and goes nationwide today.) The debut film by Panaha Panahi — son of legendary Iranian director/political martyr Jafar Panahi, a man so determined to make movies despite a government ban that he shot a feature under house arrest and smuggled the result out in a birthday cake — displays an almost perverse sense of pride in doling information in drips, snippets, superficially casual asides that turn out to be deep with meaning. What we eventually learn is that one of these travelers has to leave not just the family behind, but the country as well. It’s never explained why, or even how this will be accomplished, but an exit has been guaranteed and arranged. Given Panaha’s real-life proximity to what happens when speaking up and speaking out angers the powers that be, it isn’t hard to guess what he’s getting at by making exile the end of road for this group. Yet the particulars aren’t important. Gone is gone is gone. Parting is such sweet sorrow, even when you cackling at a six-year-old boy acting as a one-little-man wrecking crew or chuckling over a married couple’s Bickersons-ish double act.

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Yet once you’ve seen this deft blend of genres and tones, all of the inspired laughter and the lumping of throats, you see exactly how Hit the Road fits all of its elements together with remarkable seamlessness. It helps that the movie balances a sense of grace and gravitas without sacrificing either, while demonstrating the younger Panahi’s talent for knowing exactly how to compose within a frame; Jacques Tati would be proud at the way visual gags involving a cyclist riding next to the car and a runaway plastic chair are set up then impeccably detonated. You wouldn’t know it was a first film. There’s a mastery at work here that’d make you think he’s been crafting stories like this through sound and vision for ages, and in a way that doesn’t make you immediately think of pedigree. Panaha has admitted that being the son of a world-class world cinema filmmaker was his biggest self-imposed stumbling block in terms of finally becoming a writer-director. This singular, surprisingly breezy but wholly substantial look at what happens when the need to leave by any means necessary trumps everything, and the void experienced by those left behind, kills doubts as to whether he’d be coasting on someone else’s coattails. One film in, and he’s already staked his claim.

And though it’s easy to see both what is influencing Hit the Road ‘s sensibility, notably Iranian cinema’s longstanding love of car rides and children as narrative devices, and how certain storytelling expectations are purposefully being thwarted here, there’s a gentle yet firm flow to this family’s journey that allows the movie to do a lot — it can let the resident wild-and-crazy tyke wreak havoc and pause for a lyrical long shot of a motorcycle rider speeding in and out of a fogbank without missing a beat. (All of the performances are extraordinary here, and while it’s tempting to single out Rayan Sarlak for his high-energy sound and fury, it’s Pantea Panahiha you want to especially pay attention to. Her less showy turn not only fuels this film’s undercurrent of pathos, it also slowly evolves into one of the great maternal movie performances of 21st century.)

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Hit the Road

Directed by panah panahi.

Panah Panahi, son and collaborator of embattled filmmaker Jafar Panahi and apprentice to Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama. Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four – two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult, the other a ebullient six-year-old – as they drive across the Iranian countryside. Over the course of the trip, they bond over memories of the past, grapple with fears of the unknown, and fuss over their sick dog. Unspoken tensions arise and the film builds emotional momentum as it slowly reveals the furtive purpose for their journey. The result is a humanist drama that offers an authentic, often comedic, and deeply sincere observation of an Iranian family preparing to part with one of their own.

Reviews More Reviews

“A lovable and affecting crowd-pleaser with universal appeal and real potential to become a word-of-mouth hit.”

“Phenomenal! Thrillingly inventive, satisfyingly textured and infused with warmth and humanity, this is a triumph.”

“A breath of fresh air and a truly original work… contains more thrilling cinema than most other films at this year’s Cannes put together.”

“A stunningly assured road movie.“

“An intimate, frequently funny, poignant and deeply moving piece of work… damned near to being a masterpiece – if it isn’t simply one already.”

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26th Annual Festival of Films from Iran

Hit the road.

Panah Panahi, son and collaborator of embattled Iranian master Jafar Panahi, makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama.  Hit the Road  takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four—two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult, the other an ebullient six-year-old—as they drive across the Iranian countryside. Over the course of the trip, they bond over memories of the past, grapple with fears of the unknown, and fuss over their sick dog. Unspoken tensions arise and the film builds emotional momentum as it slowly reveals the furtive purpose of their journey. The result is a humanist drama that offers an authentic, raw, and deeply sincere observation of an Iranian family preparing to part with one of their own. Description courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Runtime 93 minutes
Language Persian
Country Iran
Director Panah Panahi

This Sub-Genre of Road Trip Movie Is More Relevant Than Ever

With Roe v. Wade overturned and an influx of abortion bans, it's seeming like this genre will sadly remain relevant for the foreseeable future.

The abortion road trip is a subgenre that has long existed but sadly, as abortion rights continue to be targeted and rolled back in the United States, has become more relevant than ever. These movies can take the form of a heartwarming comedy or a dark, sobering look into the various obstacles and trauma pregnant people face when trying to exert control over their own bodies. These films typically feature two women, usually friends or family members, forced to travel considerable distances or jump through hoops in order for one of them to get an abortion or emergency contraception. Reflective of reality, the characters in these films are typically impoverished women who struggle to terminate a pregnancy due to lack of legal access, lack of financial means, or both.

RELATED: 'Juno': The Abortion Movie That Isn't About Abortion

The Abortion Road Trip Is Not a New Phenomenon

Though several of the films portraying the often long, difficult road to abortion have been released in the past decade — Unpregnant , Never Rarely Sometimes Always , Plan B , Little Woods , Grandma , and Happening — this subgenre is not a new phenomenon. In 2007, the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days , which follows two college students seeking an illegal abortion in 1987, won the Palme d’Or at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. It later inspired the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to reform their procedures for selecting the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film after it was up for consideration but ultimately not shortlisted for the category. It also went on to inspire the aforementioned American film Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days takes place against the backdrop of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, a dictator who ruled from 1967 until his execution in 1989, and outlawed abortion and contraception via Decree 770 (with very few, specific exceptions). Prior to Decree 700, Romania had one of the most liberal abortion policies in Europe, but Ceaușescu’s policy, implemented to increase the country’s birth rates, instead increased Romania’s maternal mortality rate to the highest in Europe. This decree had horrific consequences both for those seeking abortions and those who performed them illegally, as anyone involved with unauthorized abortions could face incarceration.

This is the historical context in which we are introduced to protagonists Otilia ( Anamaria Mariana ) and Găbița ( Laura Vasiliu ), as Olitilia tries to scrape together enough money to pay a doctor to perform an unauthorized abortion for Găbița in a hotel room. It's a traumatizing experience for the both of them as they are eventually coerced into having sex with the doctor as an alternate form of payment. The film is a bleak depiction of the tragic conditions so many Romanian women were forced to endure under the rule of a dictator who viewed their bodies as public property.

Audrey Diwan's 2021 film Happening , adapted from French author Annie Ernaux's novel L'Événement, provides a similar historical account of the conditions women in Europe faced before abortion and emergency contraception were legalized. The film takes place before France legalized oral contraception in 1967 and decriminalized abortion via the Veil Act in 1975. It follows college student Anne ( Anamaria Vartolomei ) whose life takes a drastic turn for the worse when she finds out she's pregnant and must seek an illegal abortion, even attempting to induce one herself.

While 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Happening remind us of the dangerous conditions faced by women decades ago, they also provide a reflection of the present and look to the future with the overturn of Roe v. Wade last year and states across the country implementing even stricter abortion regulations and bans like Florida's most recent 6 week ban . As the more recent crop of American films show, pregnant people are still subject to similar conditions across the country where abortion is illegal or financially inaccessible to a large percentage of the population.

The Great American Abortion Road Trip

Though it's quite a serious topic, some filmmakers have managed to infuse it with comedy, making for some worthy additions to the road-trip comedy genre. The 2015 comedy Grandma stars Julia Garner as Sage, a teenage girl who, fearing her mother's reaction, turns to her grandmother Elle ( Lily Tomlin ) to help pay for her abortion. But Elle doesn't have the money either, so she takes Sage on a road trip around Los Angeles to collect the $630 she needs for the procedure, visiting old friends and flames along the way.

Unpregnant follows high schoolers Veronica ( Haley Lu Richardson ) and Bailey ( Barbie Ferreira ), former best friends who take a road trip from Missouri (where abortion is forbidden without parental consent), to New Mexico so Veronica can get an abortion. After a number of mishaps, the girls inadvertently end up hitchhiking with a pro-life couple who try to stop Veronica from having the abortion, but with the help of an anti-government survivalist, they're ultimately able to reach the abortion clinic in Albuquerque and get the procedure done.

In Natalie Morales ' directorial debut Plan B , seventeen-year-old best friends Sunny ( Kuhoo Verma ) and Lupe ( Victoria Moroles ) go on an overnight road trip in search of the emergency contraceptive Plan B pill when Sunny has her first sexual encounter the night before. The girls reside South Dakota, one of the states with the strictest abortion laws , so Sunny is unable to buy Plan B without parental consent. Once they finally reach their closest Planned Parenthood hours away, they find it's been shut down, and Sunny is forced to ask her mother to buy her the pill.

While these three films are able to make light of the matter in a sensitive way, Little Woods and Never Rarely Sometimes Always don't shy away the harsh realities that so many face as they seek abortions in the United States. Nia DaCosta 's feature directorial debut, Little Woods , follows sisters Ollie ( Tessa Thompson ) and Deb ( Lily James ) who reunite after the death of their mother when Deb finds out she's pregnant and turns to Ollie for help. Despite trying to turn her life around, Ollie returns to illegally selling and transporting prescription medication across the Canadian border to prevent the foreclosure of their mother's home and help Deb get an abortion in Canada. Deb is already a single mother living in an illegally parked trailer, and when she finds out giving birth without health insurance would cost her at least $8000, she looks for options to terminate the pregnancy. After failing to get an illegal abortion in their home state of North Dakota, Deb finds herself in a dangerous situation as she buys a fake Canadian ID in order to get an abortion once they cross the border.

The critically acclaimed Never Rarely Sometimes Always follows seventeen-year-old Autumn ( Sidney Flanigan ) and her cousin Skylar ( Talia Ryder ) as they travel from Pennsylvania — another state where minors are prohibited from getting an abortion without parental consent — to a Planned Parenthood in New York City so Autumn can get an abortion. Autumn at first tries to self induce a miscarriage, but when this doesn't work, Skylar steals money from their job at their local grocery store to buy bus tickets to New York without their parents' knowledge.

What Do These Abortion Road Trip Movie Have in Common?

Though the films in this subgenre tell a variety of stories, they are all connected by a number of overlapping characteristics. They all feature women who are financially disadvantaged in some way, most often teenage girls or college students who have little money of their own, and are prevented from accessing safe abortions and emergency contraception due to strict government regulations or high cost. They sometimes try to take care of the situation themselves, putting their bodies at risk because safe alternatives seems unattainable. In almost every film mentioned, the protagonists are propositioned for sex — either explicitly or implicitly — in exchange for money, access to abortion/contraception, or resources needed to get the procedure, leading to one or both characters having to compromise their bodily autonomy yet again.

The films in this subgenre may differ tonally, but they are connected in their portrayals of women coming together to each other, forming a stronger bond through their traumatic journey, even if they were estranged or emotionally distant prior to the events of the film. It's a unique experience that only people capable of pregnancy can fully understand, and these films remind us of the importance of solidarity when it comes to supporting others in the fight for bodily autonomy and safe access to abortion and contraception. Though only two of these films feature women of color, the demographic that is most negatively affected by abortion bans in the United States, all feature women whose access to abortion is limited by fraught financial situations, another important factor to consider in the conversation around abortion.

And though the two European films mentioned — 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Happening — do not touch on the religious aspect of abortion bans due to cultural differences with the United States, those taking place in the U.S. never fail to include the effect that faith based anti-abortion laws and protests have on those seeking abortions. In Unpregnant , Never Rarely Sometimes Always , Grandma , and Little Woods , when the characters arrive to the abortion clinic, they are met with protestors outside the facility, typically brandishing signs reading "abortion is murder" and similar slogans. In Grandma, it's played for comedic affect, but including these protestors, even very briefly, always serves as a reminder of the guilt added to those are already in emotionally vulnerable states by zealots looking to limit the bodily autonomy of others.

Films that fall into the abortion road trip subgenre can range from graphic and upsetting to lighthearted and whimsical, but they all critique not only oppressive abortion laws but the larger societal conditions they exist in. Unfortunately, these films are unlikely to change the minds of ardent anti-choice viewers, but they can be affirming to those who have gone through similar experiences, and important viewing to those whose minds are still open to change. It's unfortunate that this subgenre exists in the first place, and even more tragic that it has become more relevant than ever.

COMMENTS

Iranian family road trip movie wins top prize at London film festival
Hit the Road, the debut by Panah Panahi - son of esteemed Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi - centres on a family of four making a run for the border, as the father (Hassan Madjooni) struggles ...
Hit the Road
Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four -- two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult ...
"Hit the Road," Reviewed: A Mysterious and Thrilling Revelation from Iran
The movie (which opens on April 22nd) involves a family of four on a road trip in an S.U.V.—a journey that is shrouded in mystery and filled with evasive behavior.
Hit the Road (2021 film)
Hit the Road (Persian: جاده خاکی, romanized: Jadde Khaki, lit. 'Dirt Road') is a 2021 Iranian road comedy-drama film written and directed by Panah Panahi in his feature debut. It depicts an Iranian family driving to the Turkish border to smuggle their young adult son out of the country. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, and won top ...
Hit the Road Review: An Iranian Family Makes a Run for the Border
We may never know why Khosro (Hassan Madjooni) and his wife so urgently fled their home in order to smuggle 20-year-old Farid (Amin Simiar) out of the country and away from the autocratic ...
'Hit the Road' Review: Wheels Within Wheels
A family trip is the occasion for humor and heartbreak in Panah Panahi's debut feature. ... Rayan Sarlak in "Hit the Road," a road-trip movie from Iran. Credit... Kino Lorber. By A.O. Scott ...
'Hit the Road' Review: An Irresistible Iranian Debut
'Hit the Road' Review: Several Stars Are Born in an Irresistible Iranian Road-Movie Debut Reviewed in Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight), July 17, 2021. Running time: 93 MIN.
'Hit the Road' review: A heartfelt tale of familial sacrifice
Rayan Sarlak in the 2021 drama "Hit the Road.". Iranian cinema in all its poetic humanity is on lovely display in Panah Panahi's "Hit the Road," a charmingly offbeat, meaningful journey ...
Hit the Road: Iranian family road trip film is a worthy inheritor of
Hit the Road demonstrates that the younger Panahi - who worked as an editor on 3 Faces - takes after his insubordinate dad: the film is also a rambling, philosophically skewed rescue mission ...
Hit the Road (2021)
Hit the Road: Directed by Panah Panahi. With Pantea Panahiha, Mohammad Hassan Madjooni, Rayan Sarlak, Amin Simiar. Follows a chaotic, tender family that is on a road trip across a rugged landscape and fussing over the sick dog and getting on each others' nerves. Only the mysterious older brother is quiet.
Hit the Road movie review & film summary (2022)
Undoubtedly a disciple of both the Father Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami, the late Iranian master who has been deeply influential in his life (there are noticeable traces of "Taste of Cherry" here), Panahi organically laces "Hit The Road" with interludes of sharp humor and casual contemplation. Furthermore, he intertwines the family's predicaments (the root of which is hidden from the ...
Panah Panahi's Cannes Favorite 'Hit the Road' Official US Trailer
Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four - two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult ...
Hit the Road
About. Hit the Road. DRAMA. Panah Panahi, son and collaborator of embattled filmmaker Jafar Panahi and apprentice to Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama. 'Hit the Road' takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns.
Hit the Road review: Panah Panahi's wry road trip movie is a gem
Iranian filmmaker Panah Panahi's road trip movie is a bittersweet answer to Little Miss Sunshine. Parked in a dusty layby, a father and his young son squabble playfully over a cell phone in the ...
Everything You Need to Know About Hit the Road Movie (2022)
Hit the Road Movie. By Amy Renner Dec. 7, 2022. Takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. Who's Involved: Rayan Sarlak, Pantea Panahiha, Panah Panahi, Hassan Madjooni, Amin Simiar. Release Date: Friday, April 22, 2022 Limited. N/A NOT AVAILABLE MPA.
Hit The Road: An Iranian Family Road Trip Movie With A Deft Touch
A road trip movie that refreshes and elevates the genre, Hit The Road follows a squabbling Iranian family on a life-changing journey. Though it would be a stretch to describe the film as the Iranian art cinema's answer to Little Miss Sunshine, this deft hybrid of crowd-pleasing fun and poetic melancholy comes close.
Hit the Road
The son of acclaimed, embattled Iranian master filmmaker Jafar Panahi, and co-editor of his father's 3 Faces (NYFF56), makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and ultimately deeply moving comic drama. Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. With a tone that's satisfyingly hard to pin down, Panahi follows ...
'Hit the Road' Is the Quiet, Low-Key Masterpiece of the Year
This Iranian film about a family on a mysterious road trip is funny, tragic, moving and a near-perfect debut movie. By David Fear. April 29, 2022. Hasan Majuni and Pantea Panahiha in 'Hit the Road ...
Hit The Road at an AMC Theatre near you
Panah Panahi, son and collaborator of embattled Iranian master Jafar Panahi, makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama. Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four - two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult, the other an ebullient six ...
Hit the Road (2022) Movie
Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four - two middle-aged parents and their sons, one a taciturn adult, the other a ebullient six-year-old - as they drive across the Iranian countryside. Over the course of the trip, they bond over memories of the past ...
Hit the Road
Directed by Panah Panahi. Panah Panahi, son and collaborator of embattled filmmaker Jafar Panahi and apprentice to Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama. Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns.
Hit the Road
Panah Panahi, son and collaborator of embattled Iranian master Jafar Panahi, makes a striking feature debut with this charming, sharp-witted, and deeply moving comic drama. Hit the Road takes the tradition of the Iranian road-trip movie and adds unexpected twists and turns. It follows a family of four—two middle-aged parents and their sons ...
This Sub-Genre of Road Trip Movie Is More Relevant Than Ever
The abortion road trip is a subgenre that has long existed but sadly, as abortion rights continue to be targeted and rolled back in the United States, has become more relevant than ever.

Iranian family road trip movie wins top prize at London film festival

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