Arrested last week in Tehran, the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, 62, certainly the best known and awarded internationally – golden lion in 2000 in Venice for The circle, screenplay prize at Cannes in 2018 with three faces, three years after the golden bear in Berlin for Taxi Tehran – must according to the spokesperson for Justice, Massoud Sétayechi, serve the six-year prison sentence issued in a verdict against him in 2010. The filmmaker had gone to the Tehran prosecutor’s office to follow up on the case of another also award-winning filmmaker, Mohammad Rasoulof, detained since July 8 with his colleague Mostafa al-Hamad, for having denounced, in mid-May, in an open letter, the arrest of several of their colleagues by the authorities and the repression against protesters in Iran. He wanted to inquire through this process of the reasons for their arrests and their conditions of detention. But this visit ended with his arrest and incarceration in Evin prison, in Tehran, where many opponents of the regime languish.
For now, it seems that Mohammad Rasoulof (the Devil does not exist) either in solitary confinement and deprived of any legal aid, he is interrogated for his activities deemed anti-revolutionary, including, in addition to signing this appeal not to shoot at demonstrators, the fact of having made a documentary against the death of poet and director Baktash Abtin, Intentional Crime, who was serving a six-year sentence and ended up dying in early January from Covid in Evin prison. Strong suspicions weigh on the authorities of having let him die by taking a lot of time before transferring him, too late, to the hospital.
Jafar Panahi 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. However, he continued to work and live in Iran. He had been convicted 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, he lived under a conditional release regime that could be revoked at any time. In a press release, relatives of the filmmakers protest against these abrupt imprisonments and are also worried about the sanitary conditions of these shelters in the midst of the Covid wave.
On Friday, France called for the “immediate release” by Rasoulof, Panahi et Al-Hamad et “other Iranian personalities committed to the defense of freedom of expression in their country”, reporting a phenomenon illustrating “the worrying deterioration of the situation of artists in Iran”. The political and social situation in the country has deteriorated in recent months against a backdrop of shortages, occasional strikes and with an autocratic power that is strengthening its ties with Russia.