Prominent Iranian film director Jafar Panahi was sentenced Tuesday to six years in prison, a sentence he had already received in 2010 for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic”. This is reported by international news agencies. Panahi was arrested last week when he protested the arrest of his fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad.
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Panahi was sentenced in 2010 for working on a film about the controversial reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a year earlier. He was sentenced to six years in prison by a court in Tehran and he was also banned from making films, giving interviews or traveling abroad for 20 years. Panahi then said he was the victim of injustice and called the charges against him “a joke.” Shortly afterwards, he was released on bail. Fellow filmmaker Rasoulof was also arrested that year. He was eventually sentenced to a year in prison, also for “propaganda against the system”.
wave of repression
Rasoulof was arrested again earlier this month on suspicion of incitement against the state. He had spoken out on social media against the violence of the Iranian police during protests. Rasoulof and Panahi are not the only critics of the Iranian authorities who have been punished recently. In recent months, according to Iranian media, many activist artists and teachers have been arrested, among others.
Panahi has won multiple international film awards, although his films have never been screened domestically. For example, in 2015 he won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his film Cab and the 1995 Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or Prize. The French film festival last week called on Iranian authorities to release the filmmakers and said it condemned “the arrests and wave of repression against artists clearly underway in Iran.”