Jafar Panahi and his legal team will begin their legal appeal on January 4 against the one year prison sentence and two-year travel ban the filmmaker was handed by the Tehran Islamic Revolutionary Court.
In a post on X, Panahi’s attorney, Mostafa Nili, said: “After appealing against the one-year prison sentence for propaganda activities against the regime of Mr. Jafar Panahi, Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court has set the hearing date for January 4, 2026.”
It’s unclear whether Panahi, who is currently on the awards season trail with his Cannes Palme d’Or-winning drama It Was Just An Accident, will be present at the appeal hearing.
Panahi was convicted and sentenced in absentia in early December 2025 for taking part in “propaganda activities against the system.”
Panahi has long been in the crosshairs of Iran’s hardline Islamic Republic authorities.
Most recently, he spent seven months in the country’s notorious Evin prison after being arrested in July 2023 when he went to the prison to enquire about the whereabouts of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad, who had been arrested a few days earlier.
It was announced a few days later that the Iranian authorities had decided to reactivate a six-year sentence originally meted out to Panahi in 2010 alongside a 20-year filmmaking and travel ban.
The charges and sentence were connected to his attendance at a funeral in 2009 of a student shot dead in the Green Revolution and his later attempt to shoot a feature set against the backdrop of the uprising.
Panahi was released from his latest stint in jail in February 2023 after going on a hunger strike.
The director made his first trip to the Cannes Film Festival in 15 years in May 2025 with his clandestinely shot film, It Was Just An Accident, which went on to win the Palme d’Or.
It Was Just An Accident is France’s entry to the 2026 Oscars.