Filmmaker and political opponent Jafar Panahi was arrested in Tehran on Monday, according to the Iranian news agency Mehr. The authorities had already arrested two other directors on Friday, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, accused of “disturbing public order”.
62-year-old Mr. Panahi is one of Iran’s most awarded filmmakers. He notably won the screenplay prize at Cannes in 2018 with three facesthree years after his Golden Bear in Berlin for Taxi Tehran.
“Jafar Panahi was arrested [lundi] upon his arrival at the Tehran prosecutor’s office to follow the file of another director, Mohammad Rasoulof”, still according to the Mehr agency. “There is still no information on the reason for Panahi’s arrest, his connection to the Rasoulof case or to other people arrested last week,” she adds.
A dissident artist, Mr. Panahi was arrested in 2010 and then sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on making films, traveling and speaking in the media. However, he continued to work and live in Iran. He had been accused of “propaganda against the regime” after supporting the protest movement against the re-election of ultra-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Repression
Jafar Panahi’s arrest on Monday marks the third crackdown on Iranian filmmakers in a matter of days.
Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, arrested on Friday, are accused of encouraging protests after the deadly collapse of a building in the south-west of the country in May, according to the official IRNA news agency. After the tragedy, a group of artists led by Mr. Rasoulof published an open letter calling on the security forces “to lay down their arms” in the face of anger at the “corruption” and “incompetence” of officials.
MM. Panahi and Rasoulof had also recently denounced the arrest of several of their colleagues in Iran. Repression and censorship constitute “a violation of freedom of expression” and “reduce the security of filmmakers to the minimum”, they said in an open letter published in May.
Support in Cannes and Berlin
Mohammad Rasoulof, 50, won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2020 for his film the devil does not exist, but had not been able to travel to Germany. His passport had been confiscated after his previous feature film in 2017, A man of integritypresented at Cannes, where it won the prize in the Un certain regard category.
The Cannes Film Festival lent its support to the three Iranian filmmakers on Monday. Its management “strongly condemns these arrests as well as the wave of repression visibly underway in Iran against its artists, and calls for the immediate release of Mohammad Rasoulof, Mostafa Aleahmad and Jafar Panahi,” the festival wrote in a press release.
The Berlin International Film Festival had already protested last week against his arrest and that of Mostafa Aleahmad. And in a statement issued on Monday, the organization reiterated its “dismay and [son] outrage”. “The arrest of Jafar Panahi is a new violation of freedom of expression and freedom of the arts”, proclaimed the directors of the Berlinale, Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, demanding the “immediate release of the detained filmmakers”.
Many figures of the Iranian reform movement have been arrested in recent days, including politician Mostafa Tajzadeh, arrested on Friday on charges of “activities against state security”.