Iranian filmmaker Panahi must serve six-year sentence

TEHRAN

Award-winning dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, arrested last week in Tehran, must serve a six-year sentence previously handed to him in 2010, the judicial authority announced on July 19.

Panahi, 62, has won a number of awards at international festivals for films that have critiqued modern Iran, including the top prize in Berlin for “Taxi” in 2015, and best screenplay at Cannes for his film “Three Faces” in 2018.

He is the third director to be detained this month, alongside Mostafa Aleahmad and Mohammad Rasoulof, who won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2020 with his film “There Is No Evil.”

“Panahi had been sentenced in 2010 to a total of six years in prison... and therefore he was entered into Evin detention center to serve his sentence there,” judiciary spokesman Massoud Setayeshi told reporters.

He was arrested in 2010, following his support for anti-government demonstrations.

He was convicted of “propaganda against the system”, sentenced to six years in jail, banned from directing or writing films and blocked from leaving the country.

But he served only two months in jail in 2010, and was subsequently living on conditional release that could be revoked at any time.

Panahi was arrested again on July 11 after he went to the prosecutor’s office to follow up on the situation of Rasoulof.

The arrests come after Panahi and Rasoulof denounced in May the arrests of several colleagues in their homeland in an open letter.

Despite the political pressures, Iran has a thriving film industry and the country’s products regularly win awards at major international festivals.

Panahi’s detention has sparked condemnation from fellow filmmakers.

Cannes film festival organizers said they “strongly condemn” the arrests as well as “the wave of repression evidently under way in Iran against its artists.”

The Venice film festival called for the “immediate release” of the directors, while the Berlin film festival said it was “dismayed and outraged” at the arrest.

France’s foreign ministry expressed concern at the “arbitrary” arrests of the filmmakers, citing a “worrying deterioration in the situation of artists in Iran.”