Jafar Panahi Back In Crosshairs Of Iranian Authorities With Five-Year Sentence

Cannes Palme d’Or winner and Oscar nominee Jafar Panahi appears to be caught once again in the crosshairs of the Iranian authorities.

Local media have reported that the director, who spent much of 2025 and early 2026 outside of Iran on the awards trail with It Was Just Sent An Accident, had been given a five-year, one-month prison sentence.

His lawyer Mostafa Nili told Emtedad News Agency that Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court had also issued an order for the confiscation of Panahi’s possessions and assets, and slapped him with two-year social media and travel bans.

The lawyer said Panahi discovered that court hearings were underway against him after his bank accounts were frozen out of the blue.

Nili and his client paid a visit to the Sentence Enforcement Unit of the Culture and Media Prosecutor’s Office, where they learned that Panahi had been convicted “in absentia” in a separate case.

The director currently has three open cases in Iran but according to Nili had not been officially summoned for hearings, even though he is in the country.

The new sentence comes on top of a separate one-year prison sentence and a two-year travel meted out by the Iranian Branch 26 court in 2025, on charges of “propaganda activities against the system.”

Panahi has long been in the crosshairs of Iran’s hardline Islamic Republic authorities. He spent seven months in the country’s Evin jail after being arrested in July 2022 after. Iranian authorities reactivated a six-year sentence originally meted out to Panahi in 2010 alongside a 20-year filmmaking and travel ban.

He had originally gone to the prison to enquire about the whereabouts of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad who had been arrested a few days previously for criticizing the actions of the authorities in an open letter.

The reactivated sentence were connected to Panahi’s 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. He was released in February 2023 after going on hunger strike.

It seemed for a time that the authorities were softening their stance towards the director after he was granted permission to travel to Cannes Film Festival in 15 years in 2025 for the premiere of clandestinely shot film It Was Just An Accident, where it went on to win the Palme d’Or.

While on the final stages of award campaign trail, Panahi publicly denounced a deadly crackdown on a pro-democracy protests which swept the country in January 2026 in which tens of thousands are believe to have died.

In spite of the tense political situation in Iran and potential threat to his own freedom, Panahi vowed to return to his home as soon as his Oscar contender with It Was Just An Accident was completed, which he did.