Do we like Jafar Panahi?
Our score: 8 out of 10. He has paid for his stance with prison and bans for years, but his record on LGBTQ+ issues specifically is thin, so we stop short of a 9.
Panahi has been in the Iranian state's sights for well over a decade. He was arrested in 2010 and handed a six-year sentence for “propaganda against the system”, a case tied to the Green Movement protests. In 2022 he was detained again after going to ask about two detained filmmakers, and Iran's Supreme Court later overturned that old sentence because the statute of limitations had run out. He was released in early 2023.
What makes him remarkable is that he kept making films throughout. His latest, It Was Just an Accident, was made in secret after his release, then won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May 2025. In his speech he told fellow Iranians: “Let's set aside all problems, all differences.” He said what mattered was the country and its freedom.
The legal screws have tightened since. A court handed down an in-absentia one-year sentence and two-year travel ban late in 2025, and he chose to go home anyway, saying “not going back would mean accepting censorship”. In June 2026 a Tehran court rejected objections to that verdict, citing things like his film and his support for political prisoners. Then came this week's five-year sentence, which his lawyer says he learned of only after Panahi's accounts were frozen.
On the harm test, there's nothing nasty to find. He has backed the street protests in Iran, asked the world for humanitarian and advocacy help rather than calling for military action, and said of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising that the regime “lost that battle”. We found nothing from him either way on LGBTQ+ rights, and no dodgy company: his collaborators in the reporting are fellow dissident screenwriters and filmmakers.
The good stuff is mostly loyalty. When his co-writer Mehdi Mahmoudian was arrested after signing a statement condemning Iran's leader, Panahi put out his own statement describing him as “a rare moral presence”. He has said that going home was about not letting others decide where he can work: “Half of my existence is in Iran right now.”
The honest caveat is that the sentencing details come mostly through his lawyer and Iranian outlets, and sources differ on some figures. Iranian authorities haven't been quoted in what we read, so treat the exact terms with care. The pattern is clear enough though: a man punished repeatedly for speech and filmmaking, who keeps going.