Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Mani Haghighi has passport seized by Iranian officers, barred from leaving countryOctober 15, 2022

As a wave of protests continued to escalate throughout Iran, officers seized the passport and barred the departure of filmmaker Mani Haghighi, who can also be a Canadian citizen, in obvious response to the director’s broadly considered Instagram video criticizing the federal government’s brutal response to the protests.

In an indication that the regime’s crackdown has unfold far past the ladies’s-rights protesters and dissidents who started the protests in September and is now concentrating on in any other case non-political figures and artists, Mr. Haghighi was stopped as he ready to fly to the screening of his newest function movie, Subtraction, on the London movie pageant. He’s the most recent in a collection of movie administrators to be penalized by the regime this 12 months.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail from Tehran Friday night time, Mr. Haghighi mentioned he anticipated to be interrogated in coming days. He defined that he, like many Iranians, had been outraged by the Sept. 16 dying of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for not sporting her hijab in keeping with authorities requirements after which was imprisoned, severely crushed and died of her accidents. Iranian authorities have denied that she was severely crushed. Her case has sparked protests around the globe, and brought on September’s anti-headscarf protests to blow up right into a a lot wider anti-government motion.

In late September Mr. Haghighi recorded an Instagram video through which he denounced the federal government’s crackdowns in calm Farsi. Inside days it had obtained 20 million views on his account, and tens of hundreds of thousands extra on others.

“I see contradiction and sophistry,” he mentioned within the video, which then addressed Iranian lawmakers straight: “You, so pleased with your pathetic masculinity, may need to take heed to their protests, settle for their calls for, and look out for them as you’d look out in your personal kids, as a substitute of letting them be assaulted with batons and bullets, and have their corpses delivered to their households who’re then pressured to bury them at night time, in secret.”

Mr. Haghighi, who was educated in Canada and lived in Ontario within the Nineteen Nineties, is a widely known director and actor in Iran. His work tends to not be explicitly political, however extra subtly subversive. His newest movie, Subtraction, is ready in a parallel-universe Tehran through which it rains closely on a regular basis, and entails a married couple assembly and having more and more disturbing interactions with their doppelgangers.

That movie had a profitable debut on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition final month. He was headed to the airport gate on Thursday to attend its screening in London, Mr. Haghighi mentioned, when he was barred from leaving.

“The immigration man faucets my passport information into the pc, and tells me I’m not allowed to depart the nation, seizes my passport, and provides me a receipt. I make a number of snarky jokes about how far more bother I’ll make if I keep within the nation. Different individuals in line know me and know what’s occurring and are anxious. A few girls are crying. I’ve to take the receipt to a passport workplace. I anticipate they’ll ship me someplace to get politely interrogated.”

Officers supplied no rationalization for the motion. In a video assertion Friday, Mr. Haghighi mentioned it was absolutely a response to the Instagram put up. “Maybe the authorities thought that by conserving me right here they might preserve a better eye on me, threaten me and shut me up? Properly, the actual fact that I’m speaking to you on this video proper now undermines that plan.”

His passport seizure follows a collection of detainments and imprisonments of different filmmakers. In July, the director Jafar Panahi, maybe Iran’s best-known dwelling filmmaker, was sentenced to 6 years’ imprisonment on a decade-old cost of “propaganda towards the system,” after he had inquired into the detainment of two different administrators.

Iran has a historical past of persecuting worldwide inventive figures with twin Canadian-Iranian citizenship. In 2003, Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi was arrested whereas photographing protests in Tehran, and died after having been crushed severely in Tehran’s Evin Jail. Her dying provoked a diplomatic breakdown between Canada and Iran that is still unresolved right now.