Iranian film director, Mohammad Rasoulof, sentenced to 8 years with flogging

Acclaimed Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof has been sentenced to eight years in prison, according to his lawyer.

Human rights lawyer Babak Paknia, who represents Rasoulof, said Wednesday in a statement on X that his client was sentenced by an Iranian court to imprisonment, flogging and fined an unspecified amount of money. His property is also to be confiscated, the attorney said, adding that the judgement has been confirmed by an appeals court.

The sentence, he said, comes from charges of “collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security” with evidence being comments made by Rasoulof as well as his films and documentaries.

The sentencing comes as Rasoulof’s latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is to be screened this month at the Cannes Film Festival.

Paknia late last month had said that producers of the film had been summoned by authorities and interrogated. Some of its actors had also been interrogated and were banned from leaving the country, he said, adding that they were instructed to ask Rasoulof to retract his movie from the iconic French film festival.

“Outrageous!” Nazanin Boniadi, the Tehran-born British actress and activist, said on X. “We need the international artistic community to stand with artists in Iran who are being sentenced to flogging, long prison terms and to death for their art.”

Iran is known for its brutal crack downs on dissent and suppression of freedom of expression, among other human rights violations.

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2023 Country Reports of Human Rights Practices, Iran’s human rights situation continued to worsen in 2022 amid widespread protests.

Citing NGO United for Iran, there were 1,074 prisoners of conscience at the end of 2022, with the four most common reasons of imprisonment being propaganda against the regime, disruption of public order, gathering and collusion with the intention of acting against national security and membership in groups opposed to the regime.

Rasoulov was previously sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in Iran along with a second film maker, Jafar Panahi, in 2010, a sentence that was later reduced to one year.

Then in 2019, he was sentenced to one year in prison and handed a two-year ban from leaving the country.

Three years later, Rasoulof was again arrested for protesting violence perpetrated against civilians. He was released in February, along with several other political prisoners, the State Department said.

Rasoulof has directed 10 films, according to IMDB, and won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020 for his film There is No Evil.