'I decided to do whatever it took to carry on working'

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has faced not just censorship but prison at the hands of his country's leaders. Days before being sentenced again, he spoke with Adam White about his new film, 'It Was Just an Accident', and why he won't give in

- Adam White

Jafar Panahi wants to go home. “To be honest, my time is being totally wasted with all this travel,” the filmmaker tells me from a New York hotel room in the middle of a months-long international press tour. “I cannot wait for it to be over and to go back to Iran, sit down, and get to work.” As much a professional mischief-maker as he is a political dissident, simultaneously despised and feared by the Iranian authorities, Panahi cracks a wry smile. “I want to suggest a legal solution going ahead,” he says, tongue planted firmly in cheek. “All filmmakers should be banned from leaving their countries so they can actually get some work done.”

On the Thursday afternoon that we speak, the remark makes me laugh. The following Monday evening, when I hear the news that Panahi has once again been sentenced to prison by the government of his homeland, it makes me wince. But if anyone is better able to face physical and existential threats, it is a man who has defied authoritarian rule for 25 years, having persevered through a two-decade travel ban, two previous stints in jail, and a block on making films.

Speaking from behind orange shades, his voice scorched and crackling from a lifetime of cigarettes, Panahi is an enemy of the state in the mode of Fred Hampton or Jane Fonda. He’s brave. Unflappable. Almost intimidatingly cool. His films - among them the tender 1995 drama The White Balloon, and this year’s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, which is in cinemas this week – are compassionate snapshots of modern Iran.

They often allude to, but aren’t necessarily fuelled by, themes of state oppression, misogyny and police brutality, and have been widely embraced worldwide: