Status: 07/19/2022 11:18 a.m
Award-winning filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been sentenced to six years in prison for “anti-regime propaganda”. The “Taxi Tehran” director is the third prominent Iranian filmmaker to be arrested recently.
The Iranian filmmaker and Berlinale winner Jafar Panahi has to serve a six-year prison sentence. The 62-year-old will serve his sentence in Tehran’s Ewin prison, the Iranian judiciary said, according to the state news agency IRNA.
Panahi was arrested in the Iranian capital about a week ago. The award-winning filmmaker was sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for “anti-regime propaganda” and was barred from making films, writing screenplays or speaking to the media for 20 years.
He was accused of supporting protests against the re-election of ultra-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. Despite the ban on working in Iran and the ban on leaving the country, Panahi has made several films. His film “Taxi Tehran” was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival.
Other well-known filmmakers arrested
Three days before Panahi’s arrest, filmmaker Mohammed Rasulof, who had also won international awards, and his colleague Mostafa Aleahmad had already been taken into custody in Iran.
According to the Iranian judiciary, they are said to have endangered public order with an appeal against violence and also worked with opponents of the regime. The organizers of the Berlinale had protested against the arrest.
protests against police violence
The background is the collapse of a shopping arcade in the south-western Iranian city of Abadan, which killed more than 40 people in May. Protests were then violently suppressed by the police and security forces.
More than 70 people from the Iranian film industry called for an end to police violence using the hashtag “#Put your gun down”. The initiators are said to have been Rassulof and Al-Ahmad. Panahi claims to have expressed solidarity with several hundred filmmakers on the Internet after the arrest at the weekend with Rassulof and Al-Ahmad.