An Iranian court has sentenced movie director Saeed Roustaee to six months in prison for showing his film, 'Leila's Brothers,' in Cannes last year, Iranian sources said.
The Iranian daily Etemad reported on Tuesday that Roustaee and the movie's producer Javad Noruzbegi, were sentenced to six months in prison for screening the movie at the Cannes Film festival. The two men were found guilty of "contributing to the propaganda of the opposition against the Islamic system."
However, French news agency AFP reports that, according to Etemad, the film-makers will only serve one-twentieth of their sentence, about nine days, while the remainder will be suspended over five years. Etemad also reported that the verdict can be appealed, according to AFP.
'Leila's Brothers' took part in May 2022 in the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the International Federation of Film Critics prize. However, the film was then prohibited in Iran.
It “was banned by the country’s Cinematographic Organisation in accordance with the law,” Iranian Culture Minister Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaïli was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying.
The film, which is almost three hours long, portrays a poor family on the brink of implosion in an Iran plunged into a deep economic crisis. The Iranian film authorities said they had banned it “until further notice” for “breaking the rules by participating without authorisation in foreign festivals (…) in Cannes and then Munich.”
The Cinematographic Organisation said the film could not obtain a broadcasting permit, given the director’s “refusal” to “correct” his work, as the authorities had requested.
Saeed Roustaee, 32, is best known for having directed 'The Law of Tehran,' a crime film about the drugs business and its repression by the Iranian state, in 2021.
Leila's Brothers is not the only film to have fallen foul of the Iranian authorities.
In June, Tehran announced that it had lodged a protest with France against the Cannes festival’s selection of Ali Abbasi’s film 'Mashhad Nights,' which tells the story of a serial killer of prostitutes in the country’s main holy city.
Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi won the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 2022 for her role as a pugnacious journalist in this thriller.
Other major Iranian directors have also won awards at Cannes, including Abbas Kiarostami, who received the Palme d'Or in 1997, and Asghar Farhadi, who has twice won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and was on the jury this year.
