Filmmaker Jafar Panahi again sentenced to five years in prison by the Iranian authorities

Iranian dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi, already imprisoned several times, was sentenced to five years in prison and the confiscation of his property in a new case, local media reported.

“The revolutionary court of Tehran sentenced my client to five years and one month in prison and the confiscation of all his movable and immovable property,” declared his lawyer, Me Mostafa Nili, quoted Tuesday by the ISNA agency.

“The court also imposed a two-year ban on activity on social networks, as well as a two-year travel ban,” added this source, without specifying the charges. The director was sentenced in December in absentia to a year in prison for “propaganda activities” against the State, a few months after winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for A Simple Accident.

The 66-year-old director has already been imprisoned twice. The first time in 2010 for 86 days, then again for seven months between 2022 and 2023. He was released after a hunger strike. Mr. Nili said he discovered the new conviction after Jafar Panahi told him last week that his bank accounts had been frozen.

The lawyer specified that the filmmaker returned to Iran during the war waged at the end of February by Israel and the United States against the Islamic Republic. It is unknown at this stage whether Jafar Panahi is still in Iran. He currently has three ongoing cases, said Mr. Nili, adding that his client had not been informed of the hearing date for the most recent of these cases.

Jafar Panahi spoke out in January against the bloody repression of anti-government demonstrations in his country, which left thousands dead. A figure in the New Wave of Iranian cinema, Golden Bear in Berlin in 2015 for Taxi Tehran, the filmmaker won the Palme d'Or last year for A Simple Accident, filmed clandestinely in Iran.