Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi given new prison sentence

An Iranian court has handed the award-winning film director Jafar Panahi a new prison sentence of five years and one month and ordered the seizure of all his assets.

The 66-year-old, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year for It Was Just an Accident, was sentenced in absentia, his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, told the Iranian news outlet Emtedad. The court also imposed a two-year travel ban and barred him from using social media for two years, Nili said.

The charges against Panahi remain unclear. He returned to Iran in March from an overseas trip to promote It Was Just an Accident, despite having been sentenced in abstentia last year to a year in prison ‌for “propaganda activities against the system”.

A friend of the film-maker, an activist based in Europe, told the Associated Press that he had spoken with Panahi on Monday evening after the sentencing and the film-maker had not been detained.

Nili said Panahi currently faces three open legal cases, and had not been notified of the hearing date for the latest one. He only learned of the proceedings after his client’s bank accounts were frozen last week.

Moein Khazaeli, a human rights lawyer at Dadban, a legal counselling centre for Iranian activists, said the sentencing, together with the confiscation of Panahi’s assets, could violate Iran’s constitution, unless the authorities establish a clear legal basis linking the property to an alleged offence.

Speaking to the Guardian while in the US earlier this year, Panahi warned that the current “cycle of violence” in Iran could continue.

“What I have been depicting in this film is when the cycle of violence continues, then it becomes very difficult to stop it,” Panahi said. “Unfortunately, because of the savagery that is being carried out by the state, the fear is that this cycle of violence will continue.”

The latest sentence has raised concerns among fellow artists over the risks facing those who continue to work independently in Iran.

The Iranian actor Setareh Maleki, who was forced into exile after starring in Mohammad Rasoulof’s Oscar-nominated film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, told the Guardian: “One of the greatest fears of a dictatorship is losing control over the stories people tell. When those stories cross borders and reach the world, they become impossible to silence. Jafar Panahi has told his stories too, and his sentence proves once again just how deeply the Islamic Republic fears even the act of storytelling.”

Inside Iran, a film-maker currently shooting a film in secret expressed support for Panahi. “We all support him, who brings us great pride. He hasn’t remained silent and instead voices demands of the Iranian people,” said the film-maker, who did not want to give her name.

She said she believed Panahi’s latest sentence was linked to his calls for unity during the January protests and his support for diverse voices inside Iran, including supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s former shah.

The Iranian-British actor Nazanin Boniadi also condemned the ruling, saying: “Jafar Panahi has spent decades turning censorship into cinematic resistance, bearing witness to the suffering and resilience of the Iranian people. His latest draconian prison sentence is yet another attempt to silence a courageous artist whose work exposes the realities of repression in Iran.”

In a recent report, the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran warned that Iranian authorities are intensifying their crackdown on artists, writers, poets, musicians and other cultural figures, “pulling peaceful voices into the same coercive security and judicial apparatus used to suppress dissent across Iran”.