Film Professionals Unite to Condemn Iran Government Killings

Some 800 film professionals, including Oscar winners Juliette Binoche, Marion Cotillard and director Yorgos Lanthimos, have signed a joint statement condemning the Iranian government’s brutal crackdown on protestors, calling out Tehran’s killing and torturing of its own people. “We, the undersigned, with anger, grief, and a deep sense of moral responsibility, condemn in the strongest possible terms the organised crimes committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran against protesting civilians,” reads the statement. “In response to public protests “against repression, poverty, discrimination, and structural injustice,” the statement continues, the Islamic Republic has chosen not to listen to the voices of its people, but to respond with live ammunition, mass killings, widespread arrests, torture, enforced disappearances, and a nationwide shutdown of the internet.” Prominent Iranian signatories include actors Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Holy Spider) and Goldshifteh Farahani (About Elly), and directors Sepideh Farsi (Put Your Soul on You Hand and Walk) and Shirin Neshat (Women Without Men). Other well-known film figures putting their names to the statement include Nadav Lapid, Tarek Saleh, Lawrence Bender, Dominik Moll, , Claire Simon, Florian Zeller, Judith Godrèche and Ariane Labed. The statement comes more than two weeks into Iran’s crackdown on countrywide protests, the largest since the 2022 Woman Life Freedom demonstrations. With the country still under an internet blackout — the government shut down the internet on Jan. 8 — it has been difficult to assess the full extent of the government violence. But human rights groups say they have verified thousands of individual deaths and the true total is believed to be as much as 16,000 or more, with hundreds of thousands injured. Leaked images show bodies of the dead and evidence of torture. “No political power has the right to massacre its own people in order to preserve itself or to silence the truth,” the statement reads. “We call upon independent international institutions, film festivals, cultural and artistic institutions and the global community of filmmakers and artist to publicly and concretely condemn these crimes, to reassess and reconsider their relationships with official institutions of the Islamic Republic, and to support the struggle of the people of Iran for freedom, human dignity, and all inherent and inalienable human rights.” The current demonstrations are the biggest protests seen in Iran since the 2022 Woman Life Freedom movement and are viewed as being different from past popular uprisings because they have encompassed all parts of society. In an exclusive roundtable interview with The Hollywood Reporter, acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi, an Oscar contender this year with It Was Just an Accident, said the government’s response was different this time, too. “Repression [in Iran] is nothing new. The new thing is that this time they attack people, shoot at them with weapons. [We’ve seen] mass murder, and it is unbelievable…In my last film, I had a kind of hope, that this circle of violence will end at some point, and after this regime, we will have some kind of peace. But with the kind of violence that we have experienced, my fear is that even after this regime, we won’t forget, and even worse will happen.” Deadline was the first to report the news of the filmmakers’ statement.