Iranian Filmmaker Fleeing Flogging, Prison Casts Dark Cloud Over Cannes Film Festival
Dominique Charriau/WireImage
Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof said on Monday he has fled his native country after it sentenced him to eight years in prison, plus flogging, for “collusion to act against national security.”
Rasoulof is now a refugee in Europe, where he plans to attend the premiere of his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig at the Cannes Film Festival this week.
Rasoulof denounced the terrorist-supporting Iranian theocracy in an Instagram post on Monday, taunting its tyrannical rules with a video of himself walking across the border to freedom. The location of the footage suggested he might have fled over the mountains into Turkey.
“If you think Iran’s borders are in your hands, you are in a happy dream,” he sneered. “If geographical Iran suffers beneath the boots of your religious tyranny, cultural Iran is alive in the common minds of millions of Iranians who were forced to leave Iran due to your brutality and no power can impose its will on it. From today, I am a resident of cultural Iran.”
The filmmaker told the regime that he and his fellow exiles are “impatiently waiting to bury you and your system of oppression in the depths of history.”
Rasoulof also took a moment to thank the “friends, acquaintances, and people who kindly, selflessly, and sometimes by risking their lives, helped me get out of the border and reach a safe place on the difficult and long path of this journey.”
Rasoulof’s lawyer, Babak Paknia, said on Monday that his client would attend the Cannes festival, but the French distributors of his film were much more equivocal, saying only that he was “currently staying in an undisclosed location in Europe” and “might be present at the world premiere of his most recent film.”
The distribution company, Films Boutique subsidiary Parallel45, said the cast, crew, and script of the new movie The Seed of the Sacred Fig had to be kept secret “due to concerns about reprisals by the Iranian regime.”
Rasoulof said some of the actors who appear in The Seed of the Sacred Fig have fled Iran as he did, but others remain trapped in the country and could be harassed, imprisoned, or tortured to block the release of his new movie. Iranian officials banned most of the movie’s cast and crew from leaving the country in early May. Several of the actors have already been interrogated and forced to ask Rasoulof to withdraw the movie from Cannes.
Rasoulof’s previous film, There Is No Evil, was a blistering condemnation of capital punishment and censorship by the murderous regime in Tehran. It was filmed in secret and smuggled out of the country for release, during one of several periods when the regime banned Rasoulof from making movies or traveling abroad.
There Is No Evil won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020. Rasoulof could not pick up the award in person, as his passport had been confiscated. Soon after receiving the award, he was sentenced to a year in prison for making three films considered “propaganda against the system.”
In 2022, the celebrated 51-year-old director was arrested because he was one of many Iranians who criticized the government for its inept response to the collapse of a building in Abadan, southwest of Tehran.
Angry protesters gathered at the site of the collapse to accuse the government of corruption and incompetence in the shoddy construction of the building, which killed over 30 people when it collapsed. The regime responded by sending a cleric to tell them to shut up because their protests were disrespectful to the dead. When that did not work, the regime sent in thugs to clobber them with truncheons and tear gas.
Rasoulof joined other Iranian artists and celebrities in signing a statement that asked the government to “put your gun down” and address the complaints of the protesters instead of using violence to disperse them. The regime used his signature on this letter, plus his social media activity, to accuse him of taking “action against national security.” He was banned from making films for at least a year, during which time he evidently defied the order and made The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
According to Rasoulof’s statements on Monday, he chose exile “with a heavy heart” a few days ago because he learned he had been sentenced to eight years in prison plus flogging for the outstanding charges from 2022. It is not uncommon for Iranian courts to convict people in secret and leave them relatively unhindered until they are summoned to receive their punishments.
“Knowing that the news of my new film would be revealed very soon, I knew that without a doubt, a new sentence would be added to these eight years,” he said, hinting that the subject matter of the film he intends to roll out at Cannes would displease the regime even more than There Is No Evil did.
France24 added Rasoulof’s potential appearance and film debut to the list of geopolitical intrigues roiling Cannes this year, along with the war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and a “belated #MeToo reckoning that has rattled the country’s film industry in recent months.”
The latter was a reference to French filmmaker Judith Godreche, who rocked the French film world this year with testimony about sexual abuse she endured as a teenage actress. Godreche recently compiled a short film from hundreds of letters sent by French women with their own stories of sexual abuse. Entitled Moi Aussi (“Me Too,”) her film is scheduled to open one of the most prestigious segments of the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
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