This article was originally published on Oct. 14, 2025. On Dec. 1, Jafar Panahi was sentenced to a year in prison by the Iranian government, along with a two-year ban on leaving the country.

The third time Iranian director Jafar Panahi was arrested, it was with his wife, his daughter, and 15 of his friends. It was March 2010, and he and Mohammad Rasoulof had been filming a movie that would examine, in Panahi’s typical social-realist style, how the recent disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the wave of protests that followed rippled through multiple generations of one family. The pair knew Iran’s conservative government, which reviews scripts and withholds permits for movies of which it doesn’t approve, would never let them make it. So they began filming at Panahi’s

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