Jafar Panahi Sentenced to Five Years in Absentia, Assets Seized

An Iranian court has sentenced Jafar Panahi to five years and one month in prison and ordered the seizure of all his assets. The 66-year-old film-maker, who won the 2025 Palme d'Or at Cannes for It Was Just an Accident, was sentenced in absentia. His lawyer, Mostafa Nili, confirmed the ruling to the Iranian news outlet Emtedad.

The court added a two-year travel ban and barred Panahi from social media for two years, Nili said. The charges remain unclear. That detail — or rather its absence — says a great deal about how the case was conducted, since Panahi was never notified of the hearing date and reportedly only learned of the proceedings after his bank accounts were frozen last week.

Nili said Panahi now faces three open legal cases. He returned to Iran in March from a trip promoting It Was Just an Accident, despite having already been sentenced in absentia last year to one year in prison for "propaganda activities against the system". A friend of the film-maker, an activist based in Europe, told the Associated Press that Panahi had not been detained as of Monday evening.

Is the seizure of assets even legal?

Moein Khazaeli, a human rights lawyer at Dadban, a legal counselling centre for Iranian activists, said the sentencing and confiscation could violate Iran's constitution — unless the authorities establish a clear legal basis linking the property to an alleged offence. A five-year sentence with no stated charge, one might note, makes that linkage difficult to establish.

Panahi himself warned of the consequences earlier this year, speaking to the Guardian while in the US. "What I have been depicting in this film is when the cycle of violence continues, then it becomes very difficult to stop it," he said. "Unfortunately, because of the savagery that is being carried out by the state, the fear is that this cycle of violence will continue."

How have fellow artists responded?

The sentence has raised concerns among artists over the risks facing those who continue to work independently in Iran. Setareh Maleki, the Iranian actor forced into exile after starring in Mohammad Rasoulof's Oscar-nominated The Seed of the Sacred Fig, told the Guardian: "One of the greatest fears of a dictatorship is losing control over the stories people tell. When those stories cross borders and reach the world, they become impossible to silence. Jafar Panahi has told his stories too, and his sentence proves once again just how deeply the Islamic Republic fears even the act of storytelling."

Iranian-British actor Nazanin Boniadi also condemned the ruling. "Jafar Panahi has spent decades turning censorship into cinematic resistance, bearing witness to the suffering and resilience of the Iranian people," she said. "His latest draconian prison sentence is yet another attempt to silence a courageous artist whose work exposes the realities of repression in Iran."

Inside Iran, a film-maker currently shooting a film in secret — she declined to give her name — voiced support. "We all support him, who brings us great pride. He hasn't remained silent and instead voices demands of the Iranian people," she said. She believes the sentence is linked to Panahi's calls for unity during the January protests and his support for diverse voices inside Iran, including backers of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's former shah.

A recent report by the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran warns that authorities are intensifying a crackdown on artists, writers, poets, musicians and other cultural figures, "pulling peaceful voices into the same coercive security and judicial apparatus used to suppress dissent across Iran". With three open cases and his assets gone, Panahi's next months will test how much pressure Iran's most decorated living director can absorb — and whether the international industry that applauded him in Cannes responds with more than statements.