15 Oct 2025
Jafar Panahi’s Closet Picks
The writer and director talks about the impact that Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves has had on his life and how seeing it for the first time revealed the kind of cinema he wanted to amke himself.
Jafar Panahi: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest
Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com
This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Bicycle Thieves | Vittorio De Sica | 1948 |
How far across film history it reaches
The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.
How long this haul is
Its 1film runs 1.5 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 89 minutes of film for its one choice, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.
How unusual this haul was
Its 1 choice had been taken by 11 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Bicycle Thieves, taken by 11 visits in total.