Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director who won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, has been sentenced to five years and one month in prison. The court’s ruling also orders the confiscation of his assets and bans him from traveling abroad and using social media for two years.
The news of the latest ruling against one of the most prominent figures in Iranian cinema was announced by his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, in a statement to Iranian media outlet Emtedad.
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Panahi, 66, was tried and sentenced in absentia. Nili said that, in addition to the prison sentence, the court had ordered the seizure of the director’s property and imposed the two-year restrictions. The exact charges that led to the ruling are not yet known.
The director returned to Iran in March after traveling abroad to promote It Was Just an Accident, which won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. He returned despite having previously been sentenced in absentia to one year in prison on charges related to “propaganda activities against the system.”
A friend of Panahi’s, an activist living in Europe, told the Associated Press that the director had not been arrested following the latest sentencing.
Lawyer Nili also said that three legal cases against Panahi remain under review. According to Nili, the director had not been notified of the hearing date in the latest case and learned that proceedings were underway only after his bank accounts were frozen last week.
Moein Khazaeli, a human rights lawyer at Dadban, a legal center that advises Iranian activists, said the sentence and confiscation may violate Iran’s constitution. He said the authorities must demonstrate that there is a clear legal basis linking the assets to the alleged crime.
In an interview with The Guardian while in the United States earlier this year, Panahi expressed concern that violence in Iran could continue.
“In this film, I have shown that when the cycle of violence continues, it is extremely difficult to stop,” the director said.
He warned that state violence fueled fears that the cycle would continue. The ruling against him has added to artists’ concerns about the risks facing creators who work independently in Iran.
Setareh Maleki, the Iranian actress forced to leave the country after appearing in The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the Oscar-nominated film by director Mohammad Rasoulof, said dictatorships fear losing control over the stories people tell above all else.
Maleki said that when these stories cross borders and reach international audiences, they can no longer be silenced. She called Panahi’s sentence another example of Iranian authorities’ efforts to restrict freedom of expression.
Nazanin Boniadi, an Iranian-British actor, also criticized the ruling. She said that for decades Panahi had used cinema to resist censorship and portray the suffering and resilience of the Iranian people.
A director secretly making a film in Iran, who asked not to be identified, also voiced support for Panahi. She said he had not stayed silent but had spoken in support of the Iranian people’s demands.
According to the director, the sentence may also be linked to Panahi’s calls for unity during the January protests and his support for different voices within Iran, including those who support Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the country’s former shah.
The US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran warned in a recent report that the authorities are increasing pressure on artists, writers, poets, musicians and other cultural figures.
The organization notes that peaceful voices are increasingly facing the same security and judicial structures used to suppress political dissent in Iran.
Panahi’s case comes amid growing international concern about freedom of expression and artists’ rights in Iran.
