Acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi was released on bail on Friday, two days after going on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment last summer, his supporters said.
Panahi was arrested last July and later ordered to serve six years on charges of making anti-government propaganda, a sentence dating from 2011 that was never carried out.
He is one of several Iranian artists, athletes and other celebrities who have been detained after speaking out against theocracy. Such arrests have become more frequent since nationwide protests broke out in September over the death of a young woman in police custody.
Panahi, 62, continued to make award-winning films for more than a decade despite being legally prohibited from traveling and making films. His latest film, “No Bears,” opened to widespread acclaim in September while he was behind bars, a week before the protests broke out.
Yusef Moulai, Panahi’s lawyer, confirmed that he was released on bail and returned home. He said that Panahi was in good health after two days without eating. He declined to provide any further information.
The semi-official ISNA news agency said several artists had welcomed him as he left the notorious Evin prison in the capital Tehran.
IRANIAN FILM DIRECTOR WHO WAS ARRESTED LAST SUMMER IS ON HUNGER STRIKE IN PRISON
Panahi had issued a statement earlier this week saying he would refuse food or medicine from Wednesday “in protest against the extra-legal and inhuman behavior of the judicial and security apparatus.”
He was arrested in July when he went to the Tehran prosecutor’s office to inquire about the arrests of two other Iranian filmmakers. Subsequently, a judge ruled that he must comply with the previous sentence.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi appears during a photo call for the film ‘Offside’ at the 56th Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin, Germany, February 17, 2006. Panahi was released on bail on February 3, 2023, two days after going on a hunger strike to protest his sentence.
(AP Photo/Hermann J. Knippertz)
In “No Bears”, he plays a fictionalized version of himself while making a film on the Iran-Turkey border. The New York Times and The Associated Press named it one of the 10 best films of the year, and film critic Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times called it the best film of 2022.
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The protests erupted after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, was killed while in custody by Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating the country’s strict Islamic dress code. The demonstrations quickly turned into calls for the overthrow of Iran’s ruling clerics, a major challenge to his four-decade rule.
At least 527 protesters have been killed and more than 19,500 people have been detained since the demonstrations began, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has closely followed the unrest. Iranian authorities have not released official figures on deaths or arrests.
Several prominent Iranian filmmakers and other artists expressed their support for the protests and criticized the violent crackdown on dissent. Human rights groups say authorities have used live ammunition, pellets and tear gas to disperse protesters.
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Iran has executed four men on protest-related charges, and rights groups say at least 16 others have been sentenced to death in closed-door hearings.
Taraneh Alidoosti, the 38-year-old star of Asghar Farhadi’s 2016 Oscar-winning film “The Salesman,” was arrested in December after criticizing the crackdown on protests on social media. She was released three weeks later on bail.
