It keeps getting worse for Jafar Panahi. The Palme d'Or-winning director of "It Was Just an Accident" has been sentenced by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court to five years and one month in prison. The court also ordered the confiscation of all of his movable and immovable property. The news was first reported by HRANA, citing the Iranian outlet Emtedad, after Panahi's lawyer, Mostafa Nili, announced the verdict on Tuesday.
This is a new case, separate from the one-year sentence Panahi received last December for "propaganda against the system" — the verdict an Iranian court upheld in June.
The details of how this latest ruling came down are, frankly, Kafkaesque. According to Nili, Panahi was never notified of a hearing date, and the verdict was issued in absentia. The director only found out something was wrong when his bank accounts were suddenly frozen last week. Even stranger, the court documents describe Panahi as being outside of Iran — which he isn't. As I reported back in April, Panahi crossed back into the country by land through Turkey once his Oscar campaign wrapped in March 2026, knowing full well there was an active warrant for his arrest.
It gets more absurd. Nili says an arrest warrant was issued on May 20 — the very same day Panahi was physically present at the Revolutionary Court for a hearing in another case. So the court that says he's abroad issued a warrant for him while he was standing in its building. According to his lawyer, Panahi now has three other cases against him.
What did Panahi do, exactly? He made films. "It Was Just an Accident," shot secretly without a permit, is his most direct indictment of the Islamic Republic to date, drawn from the stories he heard during his seven months in Prison. It won the Palme d'Or, was picked up by Neon, and went on to land two Oscar nominations — Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature. Iranian authorities have explicitly cited it in their case against him.
This is a man who could have stayed in France. He had every reason to, and he would have been welcomed with open arms. He chose to go home instead, and this is the price.
None of this is new for Panahi, which is exactly what makes it so infuriating. In 2010, he was handed a six-year sentence and a 20-year ban on filmmaking and travel. That sentence was reactivated when he was arrested in July 2022 for asking about the detention of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad, and he was only released in February 2023 after going on hunger strike. Through all of it — house arrest, prison, bans — he kept making movies: "This Is Not a Film," "Taxi," "No Bears," and now "It Was Just an Accident."
The question now is whether the regime actually intends to put him back in a cell, or whether stripping him of everything he owns is the point. Either way, the international film community needs to be loud about this. The least we can do is not look away.
It keeps getting worse for Jafar Panahi. The Palme d'Or-winning director of "It Was Just an Accident" has been sentenced by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court to five years in prison.