Iran, Jafar Panahi has been arrested

jafarpanahi The Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been arrested yesterday evening with his wife and his daughter, only fifteen years old, at his house in Tehran. The police have arrested his 15 guests, too. So they all ended up in jail. Among these, according to opposition websites, there was also Mohammad Rasoulof, the director who had participated, last July, at Film Festival "Senza Frontiere", in Rome, with the film Head Wind, dedicated to the censorship.

The Islamic republic decides to answer with force to those seeking to convey non-stereotyped images outside Iran. The Iranian director was arrested, according to some sources, because he was making a documentary about the protests that followed the last elections and had not received permission to shoot those pictures in Tehran.
Panahi is known abroad for two films that spoke out against his country: The Circle and Red gold and he has been arrested after the request of an exit visa to attend next month a conference on Iranian cinema in Berlin.
The regime did not simply deny the visa, as it has done many times before, but decided to arrest him with all the guests who were at his home, confiscating a lot of material including his personal computer. Probably because, as reported by Radio Free Europe, Panahi is considered (by the authorities in Tehran) a supporter of local opposition.
The Iranian security services have not yet officially confirmed the kidnapping, but the complaint came from his son, Panah, who issued a warning on the opposition website, Rahesabz.
Panahi was one of the most critical voices of Ahmadinejad and was able to give voice to his thoughts through his films. One of these, Offside, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival in 2006. And it was definitely a nonconformist movies since it was the story of Iranian girls who disguise themselves as boys to go see a soccer game of the national team for World Cup qualifiers.
It was about women the movie he made in 1997, too, The mirror, which tells the plight of women in a society dominated by Islamic morals. As The Circle, the 2000 ensemble film about the history of eight contemporary women prisoners in Iran, which has been rewarded with the Golden Lion in Venice.

Panahi had already been arrested, with his wife and daughter, on the 30th July last year while they were attending a memorial in honor of Neda Aqa-Soltan, the young woman killed during demonstrations against the election in June. In that case, however, a few hours after they had all been released. But the director was forbidden to attend the film festival of Mumbai, in October, and the film festival in Berlin last month.
The arrests of yesterday shows that the situation in Iran is anything but calm. And, often, the media are the ones who suffer the worst consequence. Yesterday, for example, the authorities, as reported by the Fars news agency, has revoked the license to publish to the Tehran daily Etemad-e Melli, and to the weekly Iran Dokht and Sina, all newspapers sympathetic to the reformist leader Mehdi Karroubi.