Five-Year Sentence Hits Jafar Panahi After Oscar Campaign Return

Iran's Tehran Revolutionary Court has handed Palme d'Or winner Jafar Panahi a five-year, one-month prison sentence, delivered in absentia while the director was abroad campaigning for It Was Just An Accident.

According to local media, Branch 26 of the court also ordered the confiscation of Panahi's possessions and assets and imposed two-year bans on his use of social media and on travel. His lawyer, Mostafa Nili, confirmed the details to Emtedad News Agency.

The conviction surfaced by accident. Panahi discovered hearings were underway against him only after Iranian authorities froze his bank accounts without warning. Nili and his client then visited the Sentence Enforcement Unit of the Culture and Media Prosecutor's Office, where they learned he had been convicted in absentia in a separate case.

That detail deserves scrutiny. Panahi currently has three open cases in Iran, and according to Nili he was never officially summoned for hearings — even though he is inside the country. A conviction without summons, without attended hearings, leaves the director little documented process to appeal against.

What does this change for the director?

The new sentence stacks on existing penalties. In 2025, the same Branch 26 court gave Panahi a one-year prison sentence and a two-year travel ban on charges of "propaganda activities against the system."

The pattern runs longer:

• Arrested in July 2022, Panahi spent seven months in Tehran's Evin prison after authorities reactivated a six-year sentence from 2010, paired with a 20-year filmmaking and travel ban.
• The original 2010 sentence stemmed from his attendance at a 2009 funeral of a student shot dead during the Green Revolution, and his attempt to shoot a feature set against that uprising.
• His 2022 arrest came when he went to the prison to ask about fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad, detained days earlier for criticizing the authorities in an open letter.
• He was released in February 2023 after going on hunger strike.

For a stretch of 2025, the state's posture appeared to soften. Panahi received permission to travel to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time in 15 years, where the clandestinely shot It Was Just An Accident premiered and won the Palme d'Or. He spent much of 2025 and early 2026 outside Iran on the awards trail with the film, an Oscar contender.

Why the timing matters

The timing is not incidental. In January 2026, while in the final stages of the Oscar campaign, Panahi publicly denounced a deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protests that swept Iran — protests in which tens of thousands are believed to have died.

He nonetheless kept a promise made under those conditions: he vowed to return home as soon as the campaign for It Was Just An Accident concluded, and he did. The five-year sentence followed his return.

What remains unsaid in the court's reported action is any account of the charges behind the in absentia conviction, or of why no summons reached a defendant who was demonstrably in the country. The confiscation order and the dual bans suggest the state intends financial and reputational pressure alongside incarceration — but Iranian authorities have not publicly detailed the legal basis for the new term.

For the awards community, the case closes a circle: the travel permission of 2025 now reads less as leniency and more as a pause.