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 Tuesday.
اضافة اعلان
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 underway 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
on Friday expressed concern at the “arbitrary” arrests of the filmmakers, citing
a “worrying deterioration in the situation of artists in Iran”.
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