In August 2009, Jafar Panahi presided over the jury of the Montreal World Film Festival, a green scarf tied around his neck. A few weeks earlier, he had been arrested with his family in Tehran during a rally in tribute to a 26-year-old woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, shot dead during a demonstration by opponents of the Iranian regime.
In Quebec newspapers, the filmmaker of Circle and white balloon had called for an end to the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, re-elected to the presidency in controversy, and its abuses. “Everyone knows that this re-election is not legitimate, he confided to my colleague Marc-André Lussier. This is a real insult to intelligence. The people are not fooled. »
Panahi knew very well what awaited him on his return. He was prevented in February 2010 from going to the Berlin Film Festival, where he was to be the guest of honour. A few weeks later, he was imprisoned for “propaganda against the system”. After 77 days in detention, he began a hunger strike – in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, where he was to be a juror – and he was released on bail a week later.
Jafar Panahi has appealed his six-year prison sentence for wanting to film the popular uprisings of the Green Revolution. For more than a decade, he lived as a prisoner in his own country, under house arrest, banned from leaving Iran, speaking to the media, and directing or scripting films.
Until he was arrested again and imprisoned in Evin prison in July 2022 after attending a court hearing by fellow filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. Also on the grounds of his 2010 conviction.
On Friday, Panahi was released after 200 days of detention, after having started a hunger strike.
“I will remain in this state until, perhaps, my lifeless body is released from prison,” he had declared the day before. In October, the Supreme Court overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial, but the 62-year-old filmmaker was not released.
The sad cycle of history is repeating itself, for Panahi and his homeland. Since September, the Iranian regime has violently suppressed demonstrations in reaction to the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, arrested for allegedly not respecting the dress code imposed on Iranian women. Some 350 people, including several women and children, were killed by the authorities.
He was released because Jafar Panahi is internationally renowned. He is well aware of it. He uses his notoriety as a weapon to fight the regime from within. No filmmaker has denounced with more vigor and aplomb, in a more frontal way, the obscurantist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and misogynist regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In his public statements as in his films, celebrated all over the world, but banned from broadcasting in Iran.
Already with The white balloon, a pretty fable about a 7-year-old girl that won her the Camera d’or for best first feature film at Cannes in 1995, Panahi portrayed – thanks to the screenplay of her Iranian New Wave mentor, the late Abbas Kiarostami – the machismo and injustices of Iranian society. In The mirrorGolden Leopard at the Locarno Festival in 1997, it featured another little girl wandering the streets of Tehran, who came up against sexual segregation.
The circleGolden Lion at Venice in 2000, which deals in particular with prostitution, is a vibrant indictment, of tremendous subtlety, against the repression of Iranian women. OffsideSilver Bear in Berlin in 2006, denounces just as much the systemic sexism of Iranian society, around the ban on women attending men’s soccer matches since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Jafar Panahi paid dearly for his refusal of silence and exile. From this is not a movie (2011), an absurd demonstration of the limits of freedom of expression in a repressive regime, Panahi makes his films clandestinely.
His difficulties in filming are mentioned in the recent No BearsSpecial Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2022.
Taxi TehranGolden Bear in Berlin in 2015, also featured him, driving his car, welcoming various passengers, including human rights lawyer and political prisoner Nasrin Sotoudeh, with whom he won the 2012 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
It’s an award that describes Jafar Panahi well. He has always campaigned for freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, in a country that wants to stifle any hint of resistance. He has always denounced injustice, in a country that has made it its leitmotif. A country that is his, that he loves and that he does not want to leave.
He is a prisoner of conscience, ready to die for his ideas. He will not be silent. As long as he has access to a camera, he will continue to bear witness to what is happening at home in Iran in order to raise awareness of the tragedy that is taking place there. And some dare to say that art is useless.