“This Is A kidnapping,”: Wife Of Iranian Director Jafar Panahi Blasts Fresh Detention
deadline.comTahereh Saeedi, the wife of imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, has described her husband’s recent imprisonment as being tantamount to “a kidnapping”.Panahi has been in custody since July 12 after going to the prosecutor’s office in Tehran to follow up on the whereabouts of filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad after they were arrested a few days previously.It emerged on Monday (July 18) that the Iranian authorities had decided to reactivate a suspended six-year sentence originally meted out to Panahi in 2010 alongside a 20-year filmmaking and travel ban.His detention comes amid a clampdown on freedom of expression in Iran as the government reins in a wave of popular protests about a raft of issues, including the cost-of-living crisis, the government’s handling of a deadly building collapse, and stricter dress codes for women.Speaking to the BBC’s Persian service Saeedi said: “Jafar has some rights as a citizen.
There’s due process. To imprison someone, they need to be summoned first. But to imprison someone who is protesting outside the jail raises a lot of questions.
This is a kidnapping.”Panahi, who broke out internationally in 1995 with Cannes Caméra d’Or winner The White Balloon, has spent much of his later filmmaking career caught up in the crosshairs of the draconian Iranian authorities.He was first arrested in July 2009 after attending the funeral of Neda Agha-Soltan, a philosophy student who was shot dead in Tehran by government-backed militiamen, while participating in so-called Green Revolution protests.She became a symbol of the revolution after amateur video footage of the moment in which she was shot went viral on the internet.Panahi was arrested for a second time in March 2010 while
Read more on deadline.com
