In 2010, the Iranian government banned director Jafar Panahi from writing scripts or making films for 20 years. In the five years since, he has become even more prolific as a filmmaker, and has become arguably the most famous Muslim director in the West. And like the previous two films he’s illicitly produced and smuggled out in defiance of the ban, his latest, Taxi, takes as its subject the director’s plight and the repressive conditions under which he and his fellow Iranians endure. Probably not what the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance had in mind when it sought to punish him for noting Iran’s problems in the first place.

But Panahi’s work since the ban extends far past pure polemic. This Is Not a Film plumbed the depths of his existential hurt at being denied his life’s work, as he tried to shoot a version of his most recent script alone in his apartment with an iPhone while under house arrest. Closed Curtain explored the paranoia inherent to life in a security state. For Taxi, he takes his cameras into the street to sketch a sly, blackly comic meta-portrait of life under the heel of the government.

The winking conceit here is that Panahi, a middle-aged, bespectacled artist with an avuncular air, has been reduced to driving a cab through the streets of Tehran. His first fare, a thick-necked young bro, notices the small lens on the dash right away. (Panahi uses a variety of consumer cameras to avoid detection by the authorities while filming.) Within a few blocks, the bro and another fare, a dainty woman wearing a hijab, engage in an argument over how car thieves should be dealt with. He advocates hanging. She counters that the “pressure” of poverty often drives people to steal. It almost seems too pat—a neatly polarized discussion of social issues from two members of the nonprofessional cast before even five minutes of screen time has elapsed. But as Panahi’s tour of Tehran continues, his discursive journey picks up momentum.

His next fare turns out to be a fan, a sweaty former video clerk who briefly enlists the director in his new business—peddling bootleg Western movies, illicit goods despite the fact that the dealer can offer the latest season of The Walking Dead or “get you dailies of what’s shooting now.” A few stops later, he picks up his young niece from school, and she soon pulls out her own small camera and starts shooting him. She’s taking a filmmaking class at school and is interested in making something “distributable” by the standards of the Iranian government. The list of qualities that make a film officially acceptable for public consumption, as she recites them out of her notebook, sound like a recipe for cinematic insufferability. Above all, she was told by her teacher, “avoid sordid realism.”

As Panahi’s cab makes its turns and stops, he captures plenty of realism, sordid and otherwise. A brief meeting with an old neighbor brings film into the frame again—another crime, this time a robbery and beating, captured on security cam. But the neighbor doesn’t want to press charges. He knows the man and woman who robbed him, and they need the money. Again, with so many laws, and so much pressure, almost anyone can be a criminal. Soon, the niece has her own moment of revelation at another stop when she films a luxe wedding party and catches a young can-collector picking up a fat bill dropped by a member of the wedding. She urges him to give it back, even though it is nothing to them and everything to him, shooting all the way.

There are no fewer than four films-within-a-film here—at one point, Panahi’s camera catches the niece filming the wedding party being filmed, so two in a single shot. It’s as if, finally sprung from house arrest and venturing out, Panahi is giddy with the possibilities of shooting again, even within curtailed limits. Indeed, Taxi is remarkably engaging for a film shot with a handful of mostly static cameras that never leave a cab, but it never feels like an exercise. Panahi and his fellow travelers see what is happening in the streets outside the windows, and it’s there for them to capture, banned or not. Taxi does so, brilliantly.

The Public Cinema series screens Taxi at Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park Drive) on Sunday, Jan. 24, at 2 p.m. Admission is free.