The day after the announcement of his hunger strike, multi-award-winning Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, 62, was released from Evin prison in Tehran on Friday 3 February. The news aroused immense relief in the film industry, which has been very mobilized since his arrest on July 11, 2022. The director of Circle, Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2000, will have spent more than two hundred days behind bars. In his letter announcing his hunger strike, he explained: “I will refuse to eat and drink, and to take any medicine until I am released. (…). I will remain in this state until, perhaps, my lifeless body is freed from prison. »
Sentenced in 2010, for “propaganda against the regime”, for having participated in the protest movement against the re-election of the ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of the Islamic Republic, Jafar Panahi had been detained for two months before being placed in conditional liberty. A ban on travelling, speaking in the media and filming for twenty years had also been pronounced against him, which did not prevent him from this is not a movie (2011), Taxi Tehran (2015), Golden Bear in Berlin, and three faces (2018), screenplay prize at Cannes.
On July 11, 2022, Jafar Panahi was arrested when he had just arrived at the Tehran prosecutor’s office, to inquire about the fate of filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad, both arrested on July 8, then imprisoned, for their activism “anti-revolutionary”. Panahi in turn found himself in detention, forced to serve his sentence, pronounced in 2010. On October 15, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned this sentence, ordering a new trial – without having him released.
“We are very happy that Jafar Panahi has been released from prison, said Iranian filmmaker Mitra Farahani, author of Fifi screams with joy (2013) and See you Friday, Robinson (2022), who now lives in France. By releasing him, the Iranian authorities want to calm things down: they know how far they can go with this filmmaker who has such an aura. But Panahi’s case is very different from all the other prisoners whose names are not known…” The director cites the case of doctor and activist Farhad Meysami, sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 for criticizing the compulsory wearing of the hijab.
Mitra Farahani, director: “By releasing him, the Iranian authorities want to calm things down: they know how far they can go with this filmmaker who has such an aura”
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