Tehran has released Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof temporarily for health reasons.
Imprisoned since July 2022, Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof has been released for two weeks. As Le Film Français states, via AFP, he was released last Saturday “for health reasons“.
As reported by Le Film Français, “according to Mohammad Rasoulof’s lawyer, Me Maryam Kianersi, “My client’s incarceration was suspended for two weeks for health reasons and he was released on Saturday“. He “has now been discharged from hospital and is recovering at home“, added the lawyer, who did not give the causes of the hospitalization.These days off are not counted in his prison sentence, so he will have to stay in prison for another two weeks.“clarified Maryam Kianersi.”
Mohammad Rasoulof was imprisoned for “destabilizing activism“, as indicated by our colleagues from Liberation. But, they add, the real reason would be different, in this case to have been “signatory in May of a call for the police to stop using their weapons on the crowd protesting against the corruption and the regulatory mismanagement which led to the collapse of a tower in Abadan in the south-west of the country“.
For the record, director Mohammad Rasoulof was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020, for a film whose release was then postponed due to the pandemic, and finally arrived on French big screens in March 2022.
For this feature film entitled The Devil does not exist (see trailer above), the filmmaker had to jostle to avoid the censor’s scissors.
The Devil does not exist takes us to Iran, nowadays. Heshmat is an exemplary husband and father but no one knows where he goes every morning. Pouya, a young conscript, cannot bring himself to kill a man as he is ordered to do.
To manage to box the feature film, the team of Mohammad Rasoulof had defied the prohibitions, often turning in hiding.
For the record, the filmmaker had been sentenced in the past for assembly and connivance against national security and for propaganda against the regime. He was sentenced in July 2019 to one year in prison, followed by a two-year ban on leaving the territory and a ban on engaging in any social and political activity.