News Message

Solidarity with Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof

 

Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival invites Panahi to be its 2011 jury president.

The Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival appoints Iranian director Jafar Panahi as president of its international jury 2011. The most important human rights film festival in Germany thus joins the international solidarity movement for Panahi and his colleague Mohammad Rasoulof. Both directors were convicted in December 2010 to six years imprisonment and a twenty-year professional ban.

The Nuremberg Film Festival joins the large number of other institutions and individuals in the international film industry (such as the Berlinale, the Cannes Film Festival and the Cinémathèque Française) and condemns the verdict against the two directors sharply as it is a clear violation of the right to freedom of expression.

Panahi is one of the most renowned filmmakers in Iran and has won numerous international awards with films such as The Circle (Golden Lion International Film Festival of Venice 2000), Crimson Gold (Grand Jury Prize, Cannes 2003) and Offside (Silver Bear at the Berlinale 2006). Rasoulof drew attention to his worl with The White Meadows (2009) and the documentary Headwind (2007). Both directors have been accused of "conspiracy against national security of the Islamic Republic" and "propaganda against the Islamic Republic."

The Nuremberg Film Festival will screen some of Panahi's and Rasoulof's films in its next edition from 28 September to 5 October 2011 to support their struggle for freedom and to highlight the dire situation of many artists living in Iran today.

In 2009 the festival had organized a thematic focus on Iran. Patron was Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The first film about the Iranian presidential elections in 2009, Green Days by Makhmalbaf's daughter Hana, had its German premiere in Nuremberg.

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