At a press conference for the Kurosawa Akira Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival on Monday, exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof pointed to a fresh prison sentence against his friend and fellow filmmaker Jafar Panahi as evidence that Iranian cinema continues to face state repression. Rasoulof, who shares this year's honor with Japanese director O Mipo, spoke as the festival's closing ceremony approached, lending the award an unusually pointed political backdrop.
A Tehran revolutionary court sentenced Panahi, the Palme d'Or-winning director of It Was Just an Accident, to five years and one month in prison in a new case filed on top of a separate, prior one-year conviction. The sentence was reported as issued in absentia, a characterization Panahi's lawyer, Mostafa Nili, disputes, noting that Panahi returned to Iran on March 30, 2026, months after his film was nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar. The court also ordered confiscation of Panahi's assets, a two-year ban on social media use, and a two-year travel ban; Nili said Panahi's bank accounts were frozen the week before the ruling.
A director who keeps choosing to stay
Panahi, now in his sixties, has spent much of the past 15 years in and out of legal jeopardy in Iran. He was banned from filmmaking and travel between 2010 and 2023 and arrested again in 2022, yet has continued to make films — including The Circle, Offside, This Is Not a Film and Taxi — often shot clandestinely or smuggled out of the country for international release. "I am the kind of person who needs to be in his country," Panahi told Variety, adding that the new sentence would not change his decision to remain in Iran rather than seek exile, as several of his contemporaries, including Rasoulof himself, have done.
Rasoulof's own path illustrates the alternative: he left Iran in 2024 after his own convictions and has continued making films from abroad, work that has now been honored by one of Asia's most prominent festivals. His remarks at the Tokyo press conference, framed around Panahi's case, turned what might have been a celebratory honor into a pointed statement about the risks Iranian filmmakers who stay behind continue to run.
A sentence that can still be appealed
Panahi's sentence remains subject to appeal, and it is unclear how quickly that process will move or whether international pressure — of the kind already building following coverage from outlets covering the Tokyo festival — will factor into how Iranian courts handle it. The Tokyo International Film Festival, which runs through Wednesday, has not issued a formal statement on the case beyond the platform it gave Rasoulof at Monday's press conference. For now, the Kurosawa Akira Award stands as both a celebration of two directors' work and an uncomfortable reminder that, for one of Iranian cinema's most celebrated figures, acclaim abroad has done little to loosen the legal pressure he faces at home.
