Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was given a hero’s welcome by supporters on his return to Tehran on Monday after profitable the highest prize on the Cannes movie pageant, footage posted on social media confirmed.
After being banned from leaving Iran for years, compelled to make movies underground and enduring spells in jail, Panahi attended the French pageant in particular person and sensationally walked away with the Palme d’Or for his newest film, “It Was Just an Accident”.
With some followers involved that Panahi might face bother on his return to Iran, he arrived with out incident within the early hours of Monday at Tehran’s important worldwide airport, named after the founding father of the 1979 Islamic revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Panahi was cheered by supporters ready within the public space as he descended the escalator from passport management to baggage assortment, footage posted by the Dadban authorized monitor confirmed on social media.
One particular person could possibly be heard shouting “Woman. Life. Freedom!” — the slogan of the 2022-2023 protest motion that shook the Iranian authorities.
On exiting, he was greeted by round a dozen supporters who had stayed as much as welcome him, in accordance with footage posted on Instagram by the Iranian director Mehdi Naderi and broadcast by the Iran International Channel, which is predicated exterior Iran.
Smiling broadly and waving, he was cheered, applauded, hugged and offered with flowers. “Fresh blood in the veins of Iranian independent cinema,” Naderi wrote.
“He arrived in Tehran early this morning” and “has returned home,” French movie producer Philippe Martin informed AFP, citing his entourage.
“He has even learned that he has obtained a visa to go to a festival in Sydney in about ten days’ time,” he mentioned. The Sydney Film Festival has a retrospective of his work referred to as “Cinema in Rebellion”.
The heat welcome on the airport contrasted with the lukewarm response from Iranian state media and officers to the primary Palme d’Or for an Iranian filmmaker since “The Taste of Cherry” by the late Abbas Kiarostami in 1997.
While evoked by state media together with the IRNA news company, Panahi’s triumph has obtained solely skinny protection inside Iran and has additionally sparked a diplomatic row with France.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot referred to as his victory “a gesture of resistance against the Iranian regime’s oppression” in a publish on X, prompting Tehran to summon France’s cost d’affaires to protest the “insulting” feedback.
“I am not an art expert, but we believe that artistic events and art in general should not be exploited to pursue political objectives,” mentioned overseas ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei.
The movie is politically charged, exhibiting 5 Iranians confronting a person they consider tortured them in jail, a narrative impressed by Panahi’s personal time in detention.
After profitable the prize, Panahi made a name for freedom in Iran. “Let’s set aside all problems, all differences. What matters most right now is our country and the freedom of our country.”
Fellow Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who offered his politically-charged newest movie “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” on the 2024 pageant after fleeing Iran, paid tribute to Panahi.
“It won’t be long before ‘It Was Just an Accident’ reaches its primary audience: the people of Iran,” Rasoulof wrote on Instagram, including that “the decayed and hollow machinery of censorship under the Islamic Republic has been pushed back”.
© 2025 AFP