An award-wining Iranian filmmaker has said that authorities raided the offices and homes of several filmmakers and other industry professionals, arresting some of them.
Mohammad Rasoulof said in a statement signed by dozens of movie industry professionals on his Instagram account late on Saturday that security forces made some arrests and confiscated film production equipment during raids conducted over the past several days.
The statement condemned the actions and called them “illegal.”
In a separate Instagram post, Rasoulof identified two of the detained filmmakers as Firouzeh Khosravani and Mina Keshavarz.
Rasoulof was not targeted in the raids.
Iranian media and authorities have not commented on the raids and no additional details were immediately available.
Authorities in Iran occasionally arrest activists in cultural fields over alleged security violations.
Rasoulof won the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize in 2020 for his film There Is No Evil.
It tells four stories loosely connected to the themes of the death penalty in Iran and personal freedoms under tyranny.
Shortly after receiving the award he was sentenced to a year in prison for three films he made that authorities found to be “propaganda against the system.”
His lawyer appealed the sentence. He was also banned from making films and traveling abroad.
Iran’s conservative authorities, control all the levers of power in Iran. They have long viewed many cultural activities as part of a “soft war” by the West against the Islamic Republic.
They have said that Westernization is attempting to tarnish the country’s Islamic beliefs.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
The Philippine Coast Guard yesterday said it deployed aircraft to issue radio warnings to a Chinese research ship in a disputed area of the South China Sea “swarming” with vessels from Beijing’s so-called maritime militia. The research vessel Xiang Yang Hong 33 (向陽紅33), which is capable of supporting submersible craft, was operating near a reef in the contested Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島), which Taiwan also claims, the Philippine Coast Guard said. The Chinese ship was deploying a service boat toward the Spratly’s Iroquois Reef on Wednesday when it was spotted by a coast guard plane, “confirming ongoing unauthorized [marine scientific research]
RSS