Director nominated for Oscar set to go to prison immediately after awards show
After the Oscars wrap up tonight (15 March), Jafar Panahi plans to return home to Iran.
The nominated filmmaker has been given a one-year sentence and a two-year travel ban in the country.
His latest film, It Was Just An Accident has already picked up a number of awards and is nominated for Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
The 65-year-old has already served two previous spells in prison in Iran and had said in an interview not long before this sentence that he planned to return to his home country.
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It Was Just An Accident was shot illegally there and tells the story of five former Iranian political prisoners who are confronted with a man they believe tortured them in jail.
And while he faces the potential of winning an Oscar for it, Panahi is wanting to get back home.
Conflict across the Middle East continues after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran and killed the supreme leader on 28 February.
On 14 March, US-based group Human Rights Activists in Iran reported that 3,040 people had been killed in Iran – including 1,122 military personnel and 1,319 civilians.
Panahi recently told Bloomberg that he would never have committed to the film’s awards campaign had he known what was going to happen.
“I would try to stay there in the middle of everything that is happening, and together with my people,” he said.
However, he faces a prison sentence when he does return.
The director has been living abroad since the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was cut off from family when internet blackouts began in January.
He was sentenced in December for creating anti-government propaganda with the film banned in Iran. Film in Tehran without official permits to skirt government censors, it also features women not wearing hijabs.
Panahi plans to appeal his conviction once the Oscars are over, but has said he’ll return to Iran and serve his one-year sentence.
“I cannot be so selfish to say goodbye all of a sudden and leave,” he said of his film’s global success. However: “As soon as this campaign ends, I will have to find a way to return.”
When winning at the Gotham Awards in December, Panahi praised ‘film-makers who keep the camera rolling in silence, without support, and at times, by risking everything they have, only with their faith in truth and humanity’.
He said: "I hope that this dedication will be considered a small tribute to all film-makers who have been deprived of the right to see and to be seen, but continue to create and to exist."
Jess Battison