Iran court sentences award-winning filmmaker Jafar Panahi to 5 years in prison

TEHRAN – An Iranian court has sentenced renowned filmmaker Jafar Panahi in absentia to over five years in prison, Iranian media said quoting his lawyer, although the latest charges remain unclear.“The Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced my client to five years and one month in prison and ordered the confiscation of all his moveable and immoveable property,” the ISNA news agency reported, citing his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, on Oct 27.“The court also imposed a two-year ban on social media activity and a two-year travel ban,” he added.The ISNA report did not specify the charges.Nili said he discovered the conviction after Panahi told him last week that his bank accounts had been frozen, prompting the lawyer to visit the sentence enforcement office of the Culture and Media Prosecutor’s Office.The lawyer said Panahi returned to Iran during the war with Israel and the United States that broke out on Feb 28.It remains unclear if Panahi has remained in Iran.Panahi currently has three pending cases, Nili said, adding that his client has not been notified of the hearing date in the latest case.In June, an Iranian court rejected Panahi’s appeal against a one-year sentence in one of the cases, which was handed down in December on charges of “propaganda” against Iran.Panahi, 66, won the top prize in the 2025 Cannes film festival for It Was Just An Accident, a film in which five ex-inmates contemplate whether to exact revenge on a man they believe to be their former jailer.He has won a host of prizes at European film festivals since showcasing 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 movies for 20 years and from leaving Iran after he supported mass anti-government protests a year earlier and made 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 later, 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 movie Taxi featured him acting as a taxi driver and was shot entirely in a car.In 2022, he was arrested in connection with protests by a group of filmmakers but was released nearly seven months later.Iranian filmmakers, prominent media figures and celebrities are closely monitored in Iran, and their work reviewed for content deemed critical of the Islamic republic. AFP