After completing his military service, Panahi enrolled at the College of Cinema and TV in Tehran, where he studied filmmaking and especially appreciated the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard.

[9] At school he first met and befriended filmmaker Parviz Shahbazi and cinematographer Farzad Jodat, who shot all of Panahi's early work.

During college he interned at the Bandar Abbas Center on the Persian Gulf Coast, where he made his first short documentary films.

[19] Initially titled Happy New Year, Panahi developed the original story with Parviz Shahbazi and attempted to get funding from IRIB's Channel 1 with the expectation that it would be a short film, but his proposal was rejected.

[20] He cast non-professionals in most of the supporting roles, including a real fish seller he found in the Rasht market and a college student to portray the young soldier.

[14] In the film Razieh, a strong-willed little girl in Tehran, wants to buy a lucky goldfish for the upcoming Iranian New Year celebration, but struggles to get and hold on to the 500-toman banknote needed to purchase the fish.

[28] Although Panahi claimed that he was not a political filmmaker, his third feature was a major departure from his first two works about children and is critical of the treatment of women under Iran's Islamist regime.

[40] The film depicts an impoverished pizza delivery man's failed attempt to rob a jewelry store and the events that drove him to his crime.

In the film, a group of young Iranian girls disguise themselves as boys to sneak into Azadi Stadium to watch the World Cup qualifying football playoff game between Iran and Bahrain.

[45] The film was shot in 39 days and in order to move unnoticed through large crowds Panahi used digital video for the first time so as to have a smaller, more inconspicuous camera.

[52] On 15 April 2001 Panahi stopped over at JFK International Airport in New York City en route from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, where he was to participate in a film festival.

After being handcuffed and detained at the airport until the next morning, he was finally allowed to make a phone call to his friend Professor Jamsheed Akrami.

[30] On 30 July 2009 Mojtaba Saminejad, an Iranian blogger and human rights activist writing from Iran, reported that Panahi had been arrested at the cemetery in Tehran where mourners had gathered near the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan.

[57] In February 2010 Panahi requested to travel to the 60th Berlin Film Festival to participate in the panel discussion on "Iranian Cinema: Present and Future.

[59] Most of the group were released after 48 hours and Mohammad Rasoulof and Mehdi Pourmoussa on 17 March 2010, but Panahi had to remain in section 209 of Evin Prison.

[61] On 14 April 2010, Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance said that Panahi had been arrested because he had "tried to make a documentary about the unrest that followed the disputed 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

[63] On 20 December 2010, after convicting Panahi of "assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic," the Islamic Revolutionary Court sentenced him to six years' imprisonment and a 20-year ban from making or directing any movies, writing screenplays, giving interviews to media, or leaving Iran, except for Hajj holy pilgrimage to Mecca or medical treatment.

On 8 March 2010 a group of well-known Iranian producers, directors and actors visited Panahi's family to show their support and call for his immediate release.

[78] American film directors Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel & Ethan Coen, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Robert De Niro, Curtis Hanson, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, Richard Linklater, Terrence Malick, Michael Moore, Robert Redford, Martin Scorsese, James Schamus, Paul Schrader, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, and Frederick Wiseman signed a letter on 30 April 2010 urging Panahi's release.

[81] On 23 December 2010 Amnesty International announced that it was mobilizing an online petition spearheaded by Paul Haggis and Nazanin Boniadi and signed by Sean Penn, Martin Scorsese, Harvey Weinstein and others to protest Panahi's sentence.

"The campaign will include protest films that speak to human rights issues in Iran and throughout the world, six of which are commissioned feature-length, plus twenty shorts.

The films, which will address themes of nation, identity, self, spiritual culture, censorship and imprisonment, will be aimed for public, web and various exhibition media".

[90] In Spring 2011 Boston's American Repertory Theater and System of a Down's Serj Tankian dedicated their production of Prometheus Bound to Panahi and seven other activists, stating in the program notes that "by singing the story of Prometheus, the God who defied the tyrant Zeus by giving the human race both fire and art, this production hopes to give a voice to those currently being silenced or endangered by modern-day oppressors".

[92] European Parliament President Martin Schulz called them "a woman and a man who have not been bowed by fear and intimidation and who have decided to put the fate of their country before their own".

[94] In March 2013 Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi wrote an article highly critical of Panahi and his decision to continue making films and partially blaming him for the "tragic endings of Iranian cinema".

"[107] In the film Partovi and Moqadam star as two people wanted by the police who hide out in a house on the Caspian Sea and always keep the curtains closed to avoid detection.

Life begins to mirror art as Panahi becomes embroiled in a local scandal involving two young lovers kept apart by custom, superstition and the local moral authorities while his movie - concerning a couple who are trying to escape Iran using false passports - collapses after the two main actors involved are tangled in a web of lies as they too try to flee the repressive Iranian state for good.

[116] Jake Wilson describes his films as connected by a "tension between documentary immediacy and a set of strictly defined formal parameters" in addition to "overtly expressed anger at the restrictions that Iranian society imposes".

Like the best Iranian directors who have won acclaim on the world stage, Panahi evokes humanitarianism in an unsentimental, realistic fashion, without necessarily overriding political and social messages.

Dabashi writes, "violence in Panahi's cinema is like a phantom: you see through it, but it lacks a source or physical presence—who has perpetrated it is made intentionally amorphous.