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05-12-2025
TEHRAN/ NEW YORK: Iran has sentenced the Palme d’Or-winning director Jafar Panahi to one year in prison in absentia, his lawyer told the Agence France-Press news service on Monday.
Branch 26 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran also slapped Panahi with a travel ban for “propaganda activities” against Iran, his lawyer added. “Mr. Panahi is outside Iran right now,” he also told media, while insisting they will appeal the Iranian court ruling.
The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed Panahi is currently in the U.S. and is set to attend the Gotham Awards in New York City on Monday night. The dissident Iranian director’s latest legal and political run-in with Iranian authorities follows Panahi having won the Palme d’Or for best film for It Was Just an Accident at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It Was Just an Accident is nominated for three Gotham awards.
Panahi, who just a few years ago was imprisoned in Tehran and under a 20-year travel and work ban, returned triumphantly to Cannes and accepted his award from jury president (and vocal Panahi fan) Juliette Binoche.
Panahi’s film, his first since being released from prison in 2023, is a direct assault on Iran’s authoritarian regime. The thriller follows a former political prisoner who kidnaps a man he believes to be his torturer and then debates with other dissidents whether to kill or forgive him.
Panahi’s 86 days of incarceration in the notorious Evin prison led to a release only after the director had begun a hunger strike. He was arrested in July 2022 for going to the prosecutor’s office to inquire about Mohammad Rasoulof, a fellow Iranian director who had been arrested in May for participating in a protest.
Panahi was also convicted in 2010 of anti-government activity, but it was not enforced. His arrest in 2022 after his inquiry about Rasoulof was on the basis of the 2010 conviction. Panahi was then released because the courts said the 2010 conviction could not be enforced, since the government took too long to do so.
In recent months, Panahi has been on a film festival tour to promote his latest movie.
Panahi’s Cannes win was reported by Iranian media, which at the time hailed the award with a picture of him.
He has won a host of prizes at European film festivals and showcased his debut film The White Balloon in Cannes in 1995, which won an award for best first feature.
In 2010, Panahi was banned from making films and from leaving Iran after supporting mass anti-government protests a year earlier and making a series of films that critiqued the state of modern Iran.
Convicted of “propaganda against the system”, he was sentenced to six years in jail but served only two months behind bars before being released on bail.
A year after being handed a 20-year ban on film-making, he dispatched a documentary with the title ‘This is Not a Film’ to the Cannes festival on a flash drive stashed in a cake.
His 2015 film Taxi was shot entirely in a car and featured Panahi playing a taxi driver.
In 2022, he was arrested in connection with protests by a group of film-makers but was released nearly seven months later.
Iranian film-makers, prominent media figures and celebrities are closely monitored in Iran and their work reviewed for content deemed critical of Iran.
Last year, multi-award-winning director Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran to escape a prison sentence on charges of “collusion against national security”. (Int’l News Desk)
