Director Jafar Panahi was put under house arrest in 2010 and banned from filmmaking for 20 years. This film was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick hidden in a cake.
Calling This Is Not A Film one of the top 10 movies of 2012, critic Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post said the film "uses Brechtian staging, blurred lines between documentary and drama, and an iPhone to explore the notion of physical and political boundaries, the aesthetic and technological contours of cinema, and the enduring power of self-expression."
The title is inspired by René Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images.
Critic A. O. Scott of The New York Times rated This Is Not a Film the fourth best documentary of 2012. He called the film a "brave and witty video diary, an essay on the struggle between political tyranny and the creative imagination."
Sight & Sound film magazine listed it as number eight on its list of the best film of 2012.