EXCLUSIVE: Iranian director Jafar Panahi is to be honoured with a lifetime achievement award during the 20th Rome Film Festival, which runs from
EXCLUSIVE: Iranian director Jafar Panahi is to be honoured with a lifetime achievement award during the 20th Rome Film Festival, which runs from October 15 to 26.
Panahi will receive the award in Rome where he will present his latest film It Was Just An Accident, winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The lifetime achievement award will be conferred by the Oscar-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore.
The announcement was made by the president of Fondazione Cinema per Roma, Salvatore Nastasi, at the recommendation of Rome FF artistic director Paola Malanga.
Panahi made his feature film debut in 1995 with The White Balloon, which won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2000, The Circle won the Golden Lion in Venice while Crimson Gold (2003), written by Abbas Kiarostami, won the jury prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. Offside (2006) won the Silver Bear in Berlin.
In July 2009, Panahi was arrested for participating in a ceremony to commemorate a demonstrator killed during protest marches that followed the re-election of Mahmud Ahmadinezad. The following year, he was banned from making films altogether for twenty years.
But, in 2011, with the collaboration of Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, he made the documentary This Is Not a Film which premiered at Cannes. It was followed by Berlinale Silver Bear winner Closed Curtain (2013) and Golden Bear winner Taxi Teheran (2015).
3 Faces (2018) won an award for best screenplay at Cannes. In 2022, he made No Bears, but was unable to attend the presentation of the film at Venice Film Festival, where he won the special jury prize, because he was arrested again and accused of anti-regime propaganda. He was released from prison in 2023.
It Was Just An Accident is inspired by his time in prison. It film follows a man, his heavily pregnant wife and their adolescent daughter, who are involved in a minor car accident and swept up in a uncontrollable chain of events.
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