Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was given a hero’s welcome by supporters on his return to Tehran on Monday after winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival, footage posted on social media showed.
After being banned from leaving Iran for years, forced to make films underground and enduring spells in prison, Panahi attended the French festival in person and sensationally walked away with the Palme d’Or for his latest movie, “It Was Just an Accident”.
With some fans concerned that Panahi could face trouble on his return to Iran, he arrived without incident in the early hours of Monday at Tehran’s main international airport, named after the founder of the 1979 Islamic revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Panahi was cheered by supporters waiting in the public area as he descended the escalator from passport control to baggage collection, footage posted by the Dadban legal monitor showed on social media.
One person could be heard shouting “Woman. Life. Freedom!” — the slogan of the 2022-2023 protest movement that shook the Iranian authorities.
On exiting, he was greeted by around a dozen supporters who had stayed up to welcome him, according to footage posted on Instagram by the Iranian director Mehdi Naderi and broadcast by the Iran International Channel, which is based outside Iran.
Smiling broadly and waving, he was cheered, applauded, hugged and presented with flowers. “Fresh blood in the veins of Iranian independent cinema,” Naderi wrote.
“He arrived in Tehran early this morning” and “has returned home,” French film producer Philippe Martin told AFP, citing his entourage.
“He has even learned that he has obtained a visa to go to a festival in Sydney in about ten days’ time,” he said. The Sydney Film Festival has a retrospective of his work called “Cinema in Rebellion”.
‘Gesture of resistance’
The warm welcome at the airport contrasted with the lukewarm reaction from Iranian state media and officials to the first Palme d’Or for an Iranian filmmaker since “The Taste of Cherry” by the late Abbas Kiarostami in 1997.
While evoked by state media including the IRNA news agency, Panahi’s triumph has received only thin coverage inside Iran and has also sparked a diplomatic row with France.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot called his victory “a gesture of resistance against the Iranian regime’s oppression” in a post on X, prompting Tehran to summon France’s charge d’affaires to protest the “insulting” comments.
“I am not an art expert, but we believe that artistic events and art in general should not be exploited to pursue political objectives,” said foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei.
The film is politically charged, showing five Iranians confronting a man they believe tortured them in prison, a story inspired by Panahi’s own time in detention.
After winning the prize, Panahi made a call for freedom in Iran. “Let’s set aside all problems, all differences. What matters most right now is our country and the freedom of our country.”
Fellow Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who presented his politically-charged latest film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” at the 2024 festival after fleeing Iran, paid tribute to Panahi.
“It won’t be long before ‘It Was Just an Accident’ reaches its primary audience: the people of Iran,” Rasoulof wrote on Instagram, adding that “the decayed and hollow machinery of censorship under the Islamic Republic has been pushed back”.
