“When hairdressers have nothing to do, they cut each other’s hair”, jokes the man at the heart of this curageous statement which reached Cannes smuggled on a flash-drive hidden in a cake - “not a film” because the Iranian authorities did not allow it to be. What remains of a film-maker when banned from making films? And what is a film when not a film? An “effort by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb” (as billed on the credits), “This is not a film” is a unique dispatch from the home-front, a letter sent to the world by a film-maker under home arrest, with a six-year prison sentence and twenty-year ban from directing films, looming above his head. (Adina Brădeanu)