Hit the Road

Hit the Road (2021)

جاده خاکی

A chaotic family is on a road trip across a rugged landscape. In the back seat, Dad has a broken leg, Mom tries to laugh when she's not holding back tears, and the youngest keeps exploding into car karaoke. Only the older brother is quiet.

Date of release
2021-10-29
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (159)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Panah Panahi

Casting

Interesting facts

Hit the 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 Azerbaijani 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 prizes at the BFI London Film Festival and the Singapore International Film Festival.

Production

The film was inspired by Panah Panahi's experience with exile from Iran; his sister Solmaz Panahi was arrested for appearing in one of their father's film. Their father, Jafar Panahi, has also been arrested by the Iranian government multiple times for his films, most recently in July of 2022.

P. Panahi draws from social turmoil inside the country and says that, "in the society in which I live, the perspective is shrinking and shrinking. The only way out is exile, to try to escape from this country." He also took inspiration from his close friends who also had to exile themselves from the country, and their testimonies led to the plot's interactions and experiences with the exile plan.

Panahi himself has considered exile, but he said, "The problem is that since cinema is my passion and only way of expression, I cannot make films elsewhere. I can only make films about people that I know intimately, people whose relationships I know."

When he proposed the film, he was forced to produce a fake script in order for the film to be approved by the committees of Issuance of Film Production Permit and Issuance of Film Screening Permit, underneath the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

During the filming of Hit the Road, Panah Panahi held auditions for the core family, but when he found Rayan Sarlak, he knew he found the right actor for the younger brother character. On-set, Panahi describes Sarlak's behavior as energetic, so he had to work with Sarlak to get his energy at the right level for the take he films.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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