An Iranian Revolutionary Court has sentenced film director Jaafar Panahi, winner of several international awards and recent winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, in absentia to a year in prison on charges of propaganda against the regime, one of the director’s lawyers said Monday.
“Article 26 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran sentenced Mr. Jafar Panahi in absentia to one year in prison on charges of carrying out propaganda activities against the regime,” Mostafa Nili, one of the director’s defenders, who is currently outside Iran, said in X.
Neely pointed out that the winner of the last edition of the Cannes Film Festival this year with the film Un simplecced (“A Simple Incident”) was also sentenced to a two-year ban on leaving the country and joining political or social groups.
The lawyer added: “We will take the necessary measures to appeal this ruling.”
Director, screenwriter and human rights activist, Panahi was able to leave Iran last May after being banned from traveling abroad for fifteen years and seven months in prison, and presented the film “A Minor Accident” at the Cannes Film Festival.
“The ‘simple incident’ was not committed by us, but by the Islamic Republic, the Islamic Republic is the one that imprisons us. They should know that when they imprison an artist they have to bear the consequences,” the director explained at a press conference in Cannes about a deeply political film in which he denounces state violence against innocent citizens.
He then visited the San Sebastian festival in September, where he asserted in an interview with EFE that the Islamic Republic “destroyed itself from the inside, and only the body remains.”
In “A Minor Accident,” Panahi, 65, depicts the often surreal daily lives of Iranian citizens. A group of former political prisoners try to find out if they have found their executioner, whom they can only recognize by his voice, while busy with tasks such as preparing for their impending wedding, working in a mechanic shop or helping a woman in labor.
“In prison, they sit you in a chair against the wall blindfolded while a police officer interrogates you,” Panahi recalls. “But more than focusing your attention on what to answer, you pay attention to the voice that is asking you. You want to get to know that person and understand them, your hearing becomes stronger, and you lose the rest of your senses.”
A representative of the “Iranian New Wave”, Panahi is one of the four directors – along with Robert Altman, Michelangelo Antonioni and Henri-Georges Clouzot – who have won the main prize at the world’s three most important international festivals: Cannes, Venice and Berlin.
He won the Golden Lion of Venice in 2000 for The Circle (The Circle, 2000); The Golden Bear in Berlin for the film “Tehran Taxi” (2015), and this year the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the film “A Minor Accident”, which is the film that France presented as a candidate for the Academy Award for Best International Film.
In 2010, he was sentenced to six years in prison and 20 years without producing films, writing scripts, traveling abroad or giving interviews, on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security” and “propaganda against the regime” of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He was arrested again in July 2022 for protesting the arrest of directors Muhammad Rasoulof and Mustafa Al Ahmed and imprisoned until February 2023, when he was released after a hunger strike.