Renowned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi, 62, has started a hunger strike to denounce his detention since last July, when he was arrested after denouncing the arrest of two other filmmakers in the Persian country. “I refuse to eat or drink food and medicine until released. I will remain in this condition until my lifeless body may be released from prison,” Panahi said in a letter posted by his family on social media in the past few hours.
The author of the award-winning book Taxi Tehran or No Bears described the treatment by the Iranian judicial and security forces as “illegal and inhumane” and defined his arrest as “kidnapping”. Panahi said that while the country’s “innocent youth” are being arrested, tried and executed in less than 30 days, citing the hangings caused by the protests that have rocked the country in recent months, his case has taken more than 100 days to be completed being transferred from one court to another.
“Today, like many people trapped in Iran, I have no choice but to protest the inhumane behavior with my most precious possession, my life,” he said. Panahi was arrested in July last year for protesting the arrest of filmmakers Mohamad Rasoulof and Mostafa Ale Ahmad, who were jailed for criticizing the repression of protests sparked by a building collapse in the south of the country and caused dozens of deaths in 2022.
Panahi’s arrest reinstated a 2010 six-year national security sentence that had been suspended at the time. That ruling also banned the filmmaker from leaving the country, writing screenplays and making films until 2030.
Among the numerous and prestigious awards of his international career, Panahi won the Berlin Golden Bear in 2015 with Taxi Tehran. He previously won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes in 2008 for his film Three Faces. Eight years earlier, in 2000, he had won the Golden Lion in Venice with El círculo. His recently published work No Bears (2022), an acclaimed plea against freedom in Iran and the dismemberment of an overly traditional country, won the Venice Jury Prize.
Panahi began the hunger strike amid protests in Iran over the death of Masha Amini on September 16, three days after she was arrested by vice squads for improperly wearing the Islamic headscarf. The Iranian authorities have responded with intense police repression that has left nearly 500 dead and nearly 20,000 arrested during the demonstrations. Four of those arrested were executed. After these executions, the protests have noticeably lost momentum.
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