Iranian film director Jafar Panahi, who has been in prison since July 11, has contracted the coronavirus and transferred to quarantine at Tehran’s Evin Prison.
With severe fever and chills, Mr. Panahi requested the prison authorities to send him to a hospital outside the prison for treatment, but his request was rejected.
Jafar Panahi’s wife, Tahereh Saeedi is currently trying to arrange for him to be transferred out of prison for treatment despite the official holiday in the country.
Panahi was arrested on July 11 at the prosecutors’ office, which he visited along with lawyers and colleagues to ask about the wellbeing and whereabouts of fellow Iranian filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, who had been detained three days before.
Judiciary spokesperson Massoud Setayeshi told reporters on July 19, “Panahi had been sentenced in 2010 to a total of six years in prison, and therefore he was entered to the detention center of Evin to serve his sentence there.”
Iranian film director Jafar Panahi has won a number of international awards for films critiquing modern Iran, including the top prize in Berlin for Taxi in 2015, and the best screenplay at Cannes for his film Three Faces in 2018.
The filmmaker was arrested and soon released in July 2009 after joining public mourning for protesters killed during the 2009 mass demonstrations.
Panahi as well as family, friends, and colleagues were then arrested in early 2010. In December of that year, he was convicted of “propaganda against the system” in connection with several films he made that were seen by the authorities as critical of the clerical establishment. He was conditionally released after two months.
In 2011, Panahi received a six-year prison sentence on charges of creating anti-state propaganda and was banned from filmmaking for 20 years. He was also barred from leaving the country.
However, the sentence was never really enforced and Panahi continued to make underground films — without government script approval or permits — that were released abroad to great acclaim.
The arrests of Panahi and two other filmmakers Mohammad Rasulof and Mostafa al-Ahmad have been widely criticized by film bodies internationally.
The International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR) published an open letter on Friday (15 July) to protest against the wave of arrests among the film-making and artistic communities in Tehran.
The Cannes festival also condemned the imprisonment of Iranian filmmakers.
