Jafar Panahi’s Jailhouse Plot Twist: Will Iran’s Rebel Filmmaker Bounce Back with a Script That’ll Blow Minds (and Censors)?
Added on January 12, 2026 inMovie News Cards
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Isn’t it curious how the stars seem to conspire just when the world below is in upheaval? As Saturn grinds its relentless gears through Aquarius, shaking up authority and pushing for revolution, renowned dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi steps into the Palm Springs spotlight with a truth bomb: Iran’s government is unraveling — politically, economically, environmentally, ideologically — you name it, it’s pretty much fallen flat on its face. Panahi, armed with his Palme d’Or-winning film It Was Just an Accident, warns of inevitable protests and grim realities if the current repression doesn’t lift, even predicting a “mass killing” that could rewrite the nation’s story. Yet, despite being sentenced to prison in absentia, this fearless cineaste vows to return home and turn incarceration into creative fuel—talk about turning stones into stars! Meanwhile, other international filmmakers share their own haunting tales of conflict and inspiration, blending the lines between art and activism in a world that’s anything but predictable. So, as the cosmos whirls, aren’t we all just wondering—when the heavens shake, will the earth finally listen? LEARN MORE
Dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi says anti-government protests sweeping Iran are inevitable as the country’s authoritarian regime is crumbling on many fronts.
“We are dealing with a state that has fallen in all possible aspects. It has fallen politically, economically, environmentally and ideologically and from the point of view of foreign policy. Every which way you look at it, it has fallen,” Panahi told a Palm Springs International Film Festival panel of international directors vying for the Academy Award for best international feature film that was moderated by Kevin Cassidy, international news editor at The Hollywood Reporter.
Panahi is currently on an international Oscar campaign to promote It Was Just an Accident, his Palme d’Or winner in Cannes. He argued that Iran’s clerical establishment remains in power because of its use of brutal and now bloody repression to end a popular uprising.
“Because it is using force, it is still in place. If [the protests] didn’t happen today, it would have happened soon. And my sense is that people have decided what they want,” Panahi added. He predicted a “mass killing” in Iran if the authorities do not quickly end the political unrest.
“One or two years will pass, and then another period of unrest will rise. Such states are not going to be able to sustain themselves, just as you see anywhere in the world,” Panahi observed. As for the Iranian filmmaker in December 2025 being sentenced to one year in prison in absentia, Panahi reiterated that he will return to Iran soon.
“For my own sake, I have to go back,” Panahi told the panel as he argued that anywhere else in the world leaves him feeling like a tourist and longing to return home. “I’m not the kind of person who is able to live anywhere besides my own country,” he added.
And Panahi pointed to other Iranian filmmakers who are in prison — or, like him, have already done time in jail — to explain his predicament. “What I’m doing is nothing special. I’m only doing what my other colleagues are doing,” he said.
It Was Just an Accident was inspired by Panahi’s time already spent in prison in Iran before his release in 2023, and the people he met under those brutal conditions. And while Panahi is uncertain his one-year prison sentence already handed down will not be extended should he return to Iran, he apparently has plans for how to put any future jail time to good use artistically. “I’m going to go to prison for a year, and I’ll come out with a new script,” the dissident filmmaker declared to applause.
Elsewhere, Kaouther Ben Hania, director of The Voice of Hind Rajab, during the panel recalled the artistic inspiration for her Cannes grand jury prize-winning dramatization about a 6-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, who is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, and which is based on real events and emergency calls recorded by the humanitarian organization Palestine Red Crescent.
“When you hear her voice, you can’t unhear it,” Ben Hania said of the audio clips of the young girl begging for help from Palestinian ambulance dispatchers. But bringing that recorded audio to life on screen called for the director to push the boundaries between fiction and factual documentary making.
“This movie started with the sound. I need to find the right images and perspective to honor this sound and put it in the backbone of the movie,” Ben Hania said of the decision to use actors to dramatize the eventual death of a child whose voice can now be heard around the world.
Cherien Dabis, director of All That’s Left of You, who directed and starred in the drama about a Palestinian family over three generations to the present day, recalled being ready to start production on location in Palestine, until the events of Oct. 7, 2023, halted well-laid plans.
“We ended up evacuating Palestine,” Dabis recalled of the logistical and financial crisis that caused her to shoot her movie instead in Cyprus, Jordan and Greece just as the events of the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza unfolded. “We were making this intense film about Palestinian dispossession in 1948 and all these refugees fleeing their homes that are being bombed, and then we’re watching these images come out of Gaza that are basically echoing the same thing from 1948,” the director recounted.
In addition to Panahi, Ben Hania and Dabis, the panel was rounded out by directors Sang-il Lee (Kokuho), Petra Volpe (Late Shift) and Mascha Schilinski (Sound of Falling).
On a second panel of international directors hosted by Mia Galuppo, senior entertainment reporter at THR, Annemarie Jacir, who helmed Palestine’s official submission for best international feature, Palestine 36, said shooting sequences of military conflict and violence with a big cast, including extras, posed a challenge on set.
“Explosions kept me up [at night] because I hadn’t done that before,” Jacir said. Portraying brutal violence in Oliver Laxe’s postapocalyptic hellscape for Sirat, about a father and son joining a group of itinerant ravers in the deserts of Morocco, also occupied the mind of the French-Spanish director as he shot his fourth feature.
Jacir was joined by Oliver Laxe (Sirât), Shih-Ching (Left Handed Girl), Dolores Fonzi (Belén), Neeraj Ghaywan (Homebound), Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value), and Hasan Hadi (The President’s Cake).
“My film is a little bit of shock therapy,” Laxe explained of his concern for the movie’s audience to understand and accept his artistic intentions. “It was really difficult to write, to shoot, to edit these [violent] themes. We really suffered making them. But art is about having fears, obviously, but to jump to the abyss, even with fears,” he added.
And Joachim Trier, director of Sentimental Value, said his fears around artistic choices he made were in part personal as he helmed the Cannes Grand Prix winner after becoming a father. “This is the first film I made after having children, and the film is about a very difficult director who is a father and his daughters, and I have two now, and he’s let them down,” Trier said.
Sentimental Value stars newly minted Golden Globes winner Stellan Skarsgard as a famous director who wants to cast his estranged daughter, played by Renate Reinsve, in a movie with autobiographical undertones.
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