Alongside interpreter Sheida Dayani, filmmaker Jafar Panahi accepts the award for the most effective unique screenplay on the Gotham Awards in New York on Monday for his movie It Was Simply an Accident.
Mike Coppola/Getty Photographs for The Gotham Movie & Media Institute
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Mike Coppola/Getty Photographs for The Gotham Movie & Media Institute
The beginning of Hollywood’s awards season has been marked by highs and lows for Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.
On Monday evening, the author and director was current when his movie It Was Simply an Accident received massive at New York’s Gotham Awards, which have a good time unbiased motion pictures. Hours earlier, his lawyer shared that Panahi was sentenced in absentia to a yr in jail in Iran.
In response to his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, who posted in regards to the sentence on X and shared the information with Agence France-Presse, the sentence additionally features a two-year ban on journey from Iran and a prohibition of any affiliation with political teams, on costs of “propaganda actions in opposition to the system.” Nili added that Panahi’s authorized crew plans to attraction the ruling.
Final month, Panahi toured the U.S. for the primary time to advertise It Was Simply An Accident, which received the Palme d’Or on the Cannes Movie Competition in Might. The movie follows a gaggle of ex-prisoners in Iran who contemplate searching for revenge on a person they consider to be their former jailer. The worldwide co-production from Iran, France and Luxembourg is France’s submission for finest worldwide function for the Oscars. It Was Simply An Accident was shot in secret, a standard apply for Iranian filmmakers.
On the Gotham Awards, which many contemplate to be the place to begin for awards season, Panahi picked up three main prizes, together with finest worldwide function and finest director. In his acceptance speech for finest unique screenplay, he devoted the award to “filmmakers who preserve the digicam rolling in silence, with out assist, and at occasions risking the whole lot they’ve, solely with their religion in fact and humanity.”
“I hope that this dedication can be thought-about a small tribute,” he added, by an interpreter, “to all filmmakers who’ve been disadvantaged of the precise to see and to be seen, however proceed to create and to exist.”
Panahi’s sentencing was not his first. The director was beforehand arrested in Iran in 2010, sparking public outcry from filmmaking giants corresponding to Martin Scorsese, who denounced the ruling at Cannes that yr. Though his sentence in 2010 included a 20-year ban on filmmaking, Panahi continued to make movies in secret, together with two documentaries, This Is Not a Movie (2011) and Taxi (2015), the primary of which was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick.
In 2022, he was once more arrested after searching for data on the fees in opposition to fellow Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. He was detained for seven months and launched in 2023 after a starvation strike.
Panahi is without doubt one of the most acclaimed filmmakers to return out of Iran in current many years. He’s one among solely 4 administrators to win the best aggressive prizes on the “massive three” movie festivals — at Cannes, Venice and Berlin — and is very celebrated for his defiance of the Iranian authorities’s censorship. Regardless of his a number of arrests, Panahi has repeatedly said that he cannot see himself leaving Iran for good, and he stays dedicated to creating his movies there and nurturing the following technology of filmmakers in his dwelling nation.
