New York:
Jafar Panahi, a celebrated Iranian filmmaker who was arrested in February and accused of working on an "anti-regime" film, was sentenced to six years in prison on Saturday in Tehran, his lawyer told an Iranian news agency on Monday.
Mr. Panahi, who had expressed support for Iran's opposition green movement during post-election protests in 2009, "has also been banned from making films, writing any kind of scripts, traveling abroad and talking to local and foreign media for 20 years," according to his lawyer, Farideh Gheyrat.
The 50-year-old filmmaker was first detained in July 2009, six weeks after Iran's disputed presidential election, when he attended a mourning ceremony in Tehran for protesters who were killed during the demonstrations. The following month, Mr. Panahi was allowed to travel to the Montreal Film Festival, where he was the president of the jury, and he made a point of wearing a green scarf to the opening ceremony.
His conviction comes despite a high-profile campaign by fellow filmmakers inside Iran and abroad to win his release. In March, Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most famous director, wrote an open letter to Iran's authorities calling for the immediate release of both Mr. Panahi and another detained filmmaker, Mahmoud Rasoulof, who was also sentenced to six years in prison for his work on the same unfinished film.
In April, a group of leading American filmmakers -- including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola -- signed another open letter on Mr. Panahi's behalf. In May, days after Juliette Binoche was filmed crying as Mr. Panahi's detention was discussed at the Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Panahi was granted a temporary release on bail.
Among Mr. Panahi's prize-winning films are "The White Balloon," " The Circle," " Offside," and " Crimson Gold."
In an interview with Agence France-Presse in August, Mr. Panahi explained that the film he was shooting with Mr. Rasoulof concerned a "family and the postelection developments." He added: "When a filmmaker does not make films it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail. The main question is: why should it be a crime to make a movie? A finished film, well, it can get banned but not the director."
Last month, Mr. Panahi delivered an impassioned defense of his work as a filmmaker to the court in Tehran. Near the end of his statement, he explained that he loved his country and had no desire to make films anywhere else:
'All said, despite all the injustice done to me, I, Jafar Panahi, declare once again that I am an Iranian, I am staying in my country and I like to work in my own country. I love my country, I have paid a price for this love too, and I am willing to pay again if necessary. I have yet another declaration to add to the first one. As shown in my films, I declare that I believe in the right of "the other" to be different, I believe in mutual understanding and respect, as well as in tolerance; the tolerance that forbid me from judgment and hatred. I don't hate anybody, not even my interrogators.'
Despite the international acclaim Iranian filmmakers have brought to their nation in the past two decades, the country's government has banned many films that have won prizes abroad and shown a surprising fear of fiction films that deal with life in Iran.
In 2000, one of Iran's most popular filmmakers, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, explained that his plans to establish a film school in Tehran in 1996 had been rejected by the government at about the same time he had produced a drama based on his own part in the country's Islamic revolution, "A Moment of Innocence." Mr. Makhmalbaf wrote:
I informed the Iranian ministry of culture of my plans to accept 100 students of cinema through a selection exam, and to use new methods to train them for 4 years. But the ministry of culture of the time did not accept. They feared the generation of a new wave of young filmmakers making films in favor of democracy, thus officially announced that one dangerous filmmaker like me was enough for one country and that one hundred others like me were not needed.