Jafar Panahi’s film Taxi is emblematic of how Iranian film-makers find creative ways to undermine government-imposed regula-tions. As a socio-political critique that effectively suspends our doubtsregarding the film’s degree of improvisation and authenticity, Taxirecursively replicates its content in its own form by luring the Iraniangovernment into demonstrating what the film merely sets out to com-municate. In doing so, the film exemplifies a form of creativity withinconstraints that captures and exceeds those very constraints. By dis-cussing Taxi in analogy to ethnographic practice, this article argues thatthe captivating qualities of ethnography derive from the narrative tropeof captor-turned-captive. Here, incomplete entrapments of the field areused as a device for turning ethnographer and reader into entrapped.