The secret plan to bring a dissident Iranian filmmaker to Australia

Only two weeks ago, dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi was being feted at the Cannes Film Festival when his revenge thriller It Was Just An Accident won the Palme d’Or, confirming him as a great of world cinema.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi in Sydney.Credit: Janie Barrett

But such has been the backlash against the film in Iran that Panahi did not know whether he would be allowed to leave the country again – until his flight to Australia took off this week.

“Any minute, this was a possibility,” he said through a translator in Sydney on Friday. “When I get on a plane, I have to wait to see whether the plane is going to move or whether they are going to stop me.”

Sydney Film Festival, which is screening It Was Just An Accident in competition alongside a 10-film retrospective of his work, kept his visit secret until he appeared on opening night on Wednesday.

Panahi said that shortly after arriving back in Tehran after Cannes, “the media that are working for the government hadn’t watched the movie but they said it didn’t have any value. That the only reason that it won the prize was that I’d been in jail.”

In 2010, the director of a series of acclaimed films that criticise the lack of freedoms under the Islamic Republic was sentenced to six years in jail and banned for years from making films and travelling abroad for “creating propaganda against the system” and supporting anti-government protesters.

After serving his jail time, Panahi shot It Was Just An Accident in secret to avoid submitting a script inspired by his imprisonment to government censorship.

Despite the Cannes acclaim, the 64-year-old filmmaker accepted that he might be jailed again.

“This sort of filmmaking has its own cost,” he said. “The cost that you are going to pay is probably going to be prison. And it’s not only the filmmakers that are in this situation. It’s everybody.

“A woman going out of the house without wearing a hijab or a scarf might be fined or given a penalty ... We want to reach a situation where nobody can dictate to us what to wear, what not to wear, what to do, what not to do.”

Jafar Panahi is applauded on the opening night of Sydney Film Festival on Wednesday.Credit: Tim Levy

Panahi said that eventually Iranians would watch his film and think about whether they wanted to continue living under the current restrictions.

“These sorts of regimes, they cannot survive,” he said. “Nobody knows whether it will be today, tomorrow, one month, one year … but definitely they don’t survive.”

Festival director Nashen Moodley said it was tense waiting to see whether Panahi, who has been to Australia several times in the past, would be allowed to leave Iran again.

“Secrecy, we felt, was the safest course of action,” he said.

It Was Just An Accident will also screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August.

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