Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been sentenced in absentia to five years and one month in prison, the confiscation of all his assets and a two-year travel ban by a Tehran court, according to his lawyer.
The director of Palme d’Or-winning, Oscar-nominated film It Was Just An Accident has also been banned from engaging in social media activities for two years under the ruling issued by Branch 26 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court.
Panahi’s lawyer Mostafa Nili said the filmmaker’s bank accounts were frozen last week, prompting enquiries with the prosecutor’s office responsible for culture and media, where they discovered that a new sentence had been handed down without Panahi having been notified of the hearing. The charges underlying the latest conviction have not been publicly clarified.
According to Nili, court documents claimed Panahi was abroad and unreachable, despite his return to Iran on March 30 and an appearance before an investigative court in August in connection with a separate case.
Panahi, who is currently in Iran, faces three ongoing legal proceedings, according to his lawyer. The latest ruling follows a December 2025 conviction for “propaganda activities against the regime”, which carried a one-year prison sentence and two-year travel ban and was upheld on appeal.
The filmmaker was previously sentenced in 2010 to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, screenwriting and international travel. Arrested in July 2022 to serve that sentence, he spent seven months in Tehran’s Evin Prison before his release in February 2023.
Panahi’s repeated clashes with Iranian authorities have long contrasted with his standing as one of the country’s most internationally acclaimed filmmakers. Despite successive prison sentences and restrictions on his work, he has continued to make films and collect major festival honours, from the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for The White Balloon in 1995 to Venice’s Golden Lion for The Circle in 2000 and Berlin’s Golden Bear for Taxi in 2015.
His latest feature, It Was Just An Accident, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2025 and received two nominations at the 2026 Academy Awards, for best international feature and best original screenplay.
Panahi also featured in South Of Tehran, a short film by Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho exploring his early love of cinema in Tehran, which premiered at the 2025 New York Film Festival.
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