Director Jafar Panahi: After 14 years, the regime is lifting its travel ban

2023-04-26 17:03:04

culture Director Jafar Panahi

After 14 years, the regime lifts its travel ban

As of 5:03 p.m | Reading time: 2 minutes

Jafar Panahi and his wife Tahereh Saeedi on Instagram

Quelle: Screenshot/instagram.com/taherehsaidii/

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Persecuted, arrested, convicted: the filmmaker Jafar Panahi never bowed to the mullahs’ regime. Now suddenly there is a photo that shows him at an airport outside of Iran. What happened?

Jafar Panahi is out of Iran. This is – on the one hand – the news that the film world has been waiting for for a long time. In 2009 he was arrested after a memorial service for Neda Agha-Soltan (Agha-Soltan was a student who, like Mahsa Amini, died at the hands of the state). The following year he was sentenced to six years in prison and twenty years’ professional ban for “propaganda against the system”, and his passport was confiscated. The Berlinale invited him as a member of their jury, Panahi was not allowed to leave the country, his chair remained empty.

Panahi spent the following ten years in constant limbo: he did not have to serve his sentence and, more or less clandestinely, made new films that were smuggled out of the country and awarded at festivals, most recently “No Bears” with the special prize of the jury in Venice. Then, in the summer of last year, Panahi was arrested after all to serve his sentence, which had already expired. When he protested this with a hunger strike, he was released on bail in February.

Jafar Panahi 2006 at the Berlinale

Source: REUTERS / Arnd Wiegmann

Well, on his wife’s Instagram account, a photo of the two with luggage carts and suitcases, taken at an apparently non-Iranian airport. Tahereh Saeedi writes: “After 14 years, Jafar’s travel ban has been lifted and finally we can travel together for a few days.” An Iranian source confirmed that Panahi got his passport back: “He and his wife left Iran for a week-long trip and will return to Tehran afterwards.”

The question remains – and here comes the other side – what the process has to mean. “No Bears” shows Panahi at night on the unguarded border with Turkey, a few steps and he could have left the country. But it’s not about exile for him, it’s about being able to work in his home country. In this respect, this “official departure” is important. It is a success of his steadfastness and the international protests. It can also be a de-escalation signal from the Tehran government.

And we should think of Wolf Biermann, who was able to leave the GDR for a concert in Cologne in 1976 – and was never allowed to return.