For a week, we read here and there that he was going to be released from prison on bail, as a sign of a relaxation of the mullahs’ regime. The filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been in jail for two hundred days and the light at the end of the tunnel already seems like a decoy that his own wife can no longer believe, having been too swept away with lies and procrastination, implacable texts in negotiations for corridors, guided by the fear and cynicism of those who, under the mask of law and god, decide according to their good pleasure or the necessities of their maintenance in power. This is why Tahereh Saeedi decided to come out of her silence to post a desperate message on her Instagram account which tells of her fight but also says how much, in Iran, what could be in any other context or country the pledge of a privilege, of a hope of immunity, plays here against the filmmaker. Because what the regime hates above all in its totalitarian enterprise of generalized muzzling are the voices that carry and that can federate around them anger and action.
The uprisings in Iran under the revolutionary and feminist banner of “Woman, life, freedom”, since the death of Mahsa Amini in September, were already simmering in the spring in the multiple actions (strikes, demonstrations, etc.) that followed in particular the fatal collapse of the Metropol tower in Abadan in the southwest of the country. It is in this context that the filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad were imprisoned, just as they demanded in a petition that the police not use their weapons against citizens parading in the streets. Following them, it was Jafar Panahi who went to the court of justice in Tehran to plead their cause and demand their release. He took it very badly once again: his unfailing courage earned him to be thrown into the jails of Evin prison in Tehran without any other form of trial, the power claiming an old sentence, he who was arrested and then sentenced in 2010 to six years in prison and a twenty-year ban on directing or writing films, traveling or even speaking in the media for “propaganda against the regime”, after supporting the 2009 protest movement against the re-election of ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of the Islamic Republic.
Detained for two months in 2010 when he was invited to be a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, he went on a hunger strike and was finally released on bail on May 25 and had since then lived under a conditional release regime that could be revoked at any time. It is this sanction which served as a purely formal justification for his being put in the shade. Even more spectacular than that of his two unfortunate colleagues because Panahi, 62, is undoubtedly the most famous Iranian filmmaker and honored in the world with his prizes collected in the biggest international festivals (The circle received the golden lion in Venice in 2000, then Taxi Tehran, the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2015…). He was also honored in 2012 by the European Parliament with the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. He is clearly a dissident from within who has always refused to leave his country, even clandestinely, as he sublimely depicts in his latest feature film, No Bear, released in France in November, in which he plays the role of a filmmaker under surveillance who is offered a nocturnal border crossing without (too) much danger. When he crosses the imaginary line, he jumps, as if horrified, and turns around, even if it means facing other horrors later in the story, an adversity full of arbitrariness and anguish.
Mohammad Rasoulof would have had the right to go out for a fortnight for health reasons and it would seem that Jafar Panahi contracted a skin disease in the cell. Promiscuity has steadily increased since the uprising, with his prison filling up every day with more demonstrators risking their lives. Being still alive in these conditions ends up seeming an exorbitant privilege that no less than four men have lost in two months, hung high and short after hasty trials, tortured for example. This is the conclusion of the filmmaker’s wife: the regime wants you, under its thumb, to say how happy you are to suffer its violence. Didier Peron
Are we happy? We are devastated…
“We are happy. Or should I say, we were happy…
A year ago, Jafar’s six-year jail verdict was a decade old and we thought he wouldn’t be going back to jail again. According to the very law by which he was tried, a sentence not carried out within ten years becomes obsolete.
But… last July 11, his birthday, I was informed that he had been imprisoned in the name of a verdict rendered, therefore, eleven years ago.
We forgot why we were happy…
Until the day when Mr. Amir Salar Davoodi, a lawyer specializing in human rights, and Jafar’s cellmate in Evin prison, reminded him of all the specificities of this law.
Are we happy again?
Saleh Nikbakht and Youssef Molayi, Jafar’s lawyers, tirelessly pleaded his case, using irrefutable arguments, and convinced the Supreme Court of his innocence and pleaded for the reversal of this outdated verdict.
Jafar was therefore acquitted by the Supreme Court and his case was transferred to the Revolutionary Court of Appeal number 21. Are we much happier that way? By law, he must be immediately released on bail. And yet? On December 3, we were informed that an intervention by the security administration had resulted in the quashing of the judgment allowing Jafar’s release.
We are devastated…
Last week we were informed that he would be released in a week. We were happy again. A week has passed, and Jafar is still not with us. It’s been exactly 200 days now. We are desperate…
Jafar’s release is in full compliance with their own laws, but they are above the law with no respect for the law.
If, in spite of all this, you ask us how we are, and if we are happy, we will answer you that we are happy, and that we are well. But don’t take our word for it.”