‘It Was Just An Accident. Director Jafar Panahi Sentenced To One Year In Prison

Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been sentenced to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban in absentia, his lawyer Mustafa Nili announced on X on Monday.

The lawyer said that Branch 26 of the Tehran Islamic Revolutionary Court had also banned the director from membership of political and social groups due to “propaganda activities against the system.”

Panahi is currently on the awards season trail with his Cannes Palme d’Or-winning drama It Was Just An Accident, which is France’s entry to the 2026 Oscars.

He is currently in New York for the Gotham Awards tonight, and then heads to the Marrakech Film Festival in Morocco where he will participate in a Conversation event on December 4, before returning to Europe.

Panahi has long been in the crosshairs of Iran’s hardline Islamic Republic authorities.

Most recently, he spent seven months in the country’s notorious Evin jail after being arrested in July 2023 when he went to the prison to enquire about the the whereabouts of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad who had been arrested a few days previously.

It was announced a few days later that the Iranian authorities had decided to reactivate a six-year sentence originally meted out to Panahi in 2010 alongside a 20-year filmmaking and travel ban.

The charges and sentence were connected to his attendance of a funeral in 2009 of a student shot dead in the Green Revolution and his later attempt to shoot a feature set against the backdrop of the uprising.

Panahi was released from his latest stint in jail in February 2023 after going on hunger strike.

The director made his first trip to the Cannes Film Festival in 15 years in May of this year, to accompany his clandestinely shot film It Was Just An Accident, where it went on to win the Palme d’Or.