The director, whose films like The White Balloon, The Circle, Offside, This Is Not a Film, Taxi, No Bears, 3 Faces, and this year’s Oscar-nominated It Was Just An Accident are held as among the greatest achievements in Iranian cinema, has long been a target of the Iranian government. In 2010, Panahi was arrested for attempting to document the protests following the disputed reelection of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As a result, Panahi was convicted of “propaganda against the Islamic Republic” and sentenced to six years in prison and banned from making films for 20 years.
Panahi refused to abide by the ban and subsequent arrests and travel restrictions, with his 2011 This Is Not A Film (the title a cheeky reference to the prohibition) being smuggled out of the country for its Cannes Film Festival premiere on a flash drive and the filmmaker going on to make his later films in secret. Multiple fellow filmmakers and actors around the world have publicly condemned Panahi’s treatment. The latest persecution against Panahi remains murky—Variety reports that it’s unclear what the filmmaker is being charged with, and while he was sentenced in absentia, further reports indicate that Panahi has been in Iran since March.
And while the exact state of Panahi’s case and indeed his whereabouts remains unknown (Panahi’s lawyers reported that his bank accounts have been frozen), this latest act of government suppression is unlikely to deter the filmmaker, who has gone on multiple hunger strikes during his various ordeals. As Panahi told Variety in January, “I am the kind of person who needs to be in his country. I need to breathe there and work there. And even if they want to go ahead with that prison sentence, they can go ahead. Nothing will change my mind about going back.”
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