Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been been summoned for a court hearing in Iran on May 20 as part of a retrial related to charges against him of “propaganda activity against the regime”, according to local media reports.
The hearing will take place close to a year after Panahi was feted with the Cannes Palme d’Or for his film It Was Just An Accident by a jury presided over by Juliette Binoche.
Panahi was sentenced to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban in absentia at the end of last year while on the awards trail with the film.
Branch 26 of the Tehran Islamic Revolutionary Court, which is overseeing the case, also banned the director from membership of political and social groups.
Panahi returned to Iran at the end of March shortly after the ceremony for the 98th Academy Awards in which It Was Just An Accident made it to the nomination stage in the Best International Feature Film Category.
The retrial has been called following an appeal by Panahi’s lawyers.
Panahi has long been in the crosshairs of Iran’s hardline Islamic Republic authorities.
Most recently, he spent seven months in the country’s Evin jail after being arrested in July 2023 when he went to the prison to enquire about the the whereabouts of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad who had been arrested a few days previously.
It was announced a few days later that the Iranian authorities had decided to reactivate a six-year sentence originally meted out to Panahi in 2010 alongside a 20-year filmmaking and travel ban.
The charges and sentence were connected to his attendance of a funeral in 2009 of a student shot dead in the Green Revolution and his later attempt to shoot a feature set against the backdrop of the uprising. Panahi was released from his latest stint in jail in February 2023 after going on hunger strike.
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