Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident, has been sentenced to a further five years and one month in prison by a Tehran Revolutionary Court. The ruling, issued in absentia, adds to a previous one-year prison sentence against the director. The court also ordered the confiscation of his assets and imposed a two-year ban on international travel and social media use.
The news was reported by Emtedad, an Iranian reformist news agency, citing statements by Panahi’s lawyer, Mostafa Nili. According to the lawyer, the implementation of both the new sentence and the previous conviction remains at the authorities’ discretion. The specific charges underlying the latest ruling have not yet been disclosed.
Nili explained that last week, after the filmmaker’s bank accounts were suddenly frozen, he went with his client to the Tehran prosecutor’s office. There, he learned of the sentence, which had been issued in absentia. According to the case file, Panahi was living outside Iran, although the filmmaker had returned to the country on March 30, 2026, shortly after the Academy Awards ceremony. His latest film, It Was Just an Accident, had been nominated as France’s entry in the Best International Feature Film category.
Panahi’s legal troubles are part of a long history of confrontations with the Iranian authorities. In 2010, the director was sentenced to prison and banned from making films, giving interviews and leaving the country. Despite these restrictions, he continued to make films clandestinely, producing some of the defining works of his career during this period, including This Is Not a Film, Taxi and 3 Faces.
In 2022, he was arrested amid protests by a group of filmmakers and remained in prison for approximately seven months. The travel ban was lifted in April 2023, allowing him to attend the Cannes Film Festival to present It Was Just an Accident. Partly inspired by his own experience in prison, the film follows a group of former detainees as they confront the possibility of taking revenge on a man they identify as their torturer.
The film’s international recognition, culminating in the Palme d’Or, did not bring an end to the director’s legal troubles. Panahi was already facing a one-year prison sentence on charges related to propaganda activities against the Iranian state when he decided to return to his home country, despite escalating political tensions and the risks involved in his decision.
In an interview with Variety, the filmmaker explained his reasons for returning: “I am the kind of person who needs to be in his country. I need to breathe there and work there. And even if they want to go ahead with that prison sentence, they can go ahead. Nothing will change my mind about going back.”
The new ruling once again places the filmmaker, one of the leading figures in contemporary Iranian cinema, at risk of imprisonment. Meanwhile, the authorities have also moved against his assets and restricted his freedom of movement, in a case that has renewed international concerns about the judicial persecution of artists and filmmakers in Iran.