5:09pm GMT Tehran has begun seizing the assets of an acclaimed Iranian film director after a court sentenced him to more than five years in prison.

Mizan, the judiciary’s news agency, confirmed that the sentence against Jafar Panahi had become final and that steps to locate and impound his assets were under way on Saturday afternoon.

Mr Panahi has been summoned to begin serving a term of five years and one month, it said – the latest and most severe turn in a two-decade campaign of prosecutions against one of Iran’s most celebrated directors.

The judiciary said he had been convicted of “media and propaganda activity against national security” under Article 4 of a law on intensifying the punishment of espionage and cooperation with Israel and hostile states.

In its statement, it framed his work as “complicit” with “the Zionist regime”, as “blackwashing” Iran’s image and as “echoing opponents abroad”. It did not specify which of his actions had led to the charges.

Jafar Panahi attends the Baftas at the Royal Festival Hall in London in February Mostafa Nili, Mr Panahi’s lawyer, said Branch 26 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court had sentenced the director to the prison term along with the confiscation of all his “movable and immovable” property, a two-year ban on activity on social media, and a two-year travel ban. The verdict, he said, was handed down in absentia, despite Mr Panahi being in Iran.

Mr Nili said the family learned of the ruling only after Mr Panahi’s bank accounts were frozen, and that the filmmaker had been listed in the case as being outside the country. This was despite him returning to Iran via Turkey in April, during the initial 40-day conflict with the United States and Israel. The director faces three separate cases, according to his lawyer.

He had previously been sentenced to a year in prison in a separate case on charges of “propaganda against the system”. The judiciary said this prosecution dated from March, when, as it put it, the country was under military attack, and the prosecutor general brought charges against a number of online activists, celebrities and artists. Mr Panahi was among them.

The judiciary’s news agency said he had failed to appear at investigative hearings or at trial, though he later retained a lawyer, and that he had not filed an appeal.

Mr Panahi is among the most internationally honoured of contemporary Iranian directors, and has continued to make films despite being repeatedly jailed, banned from travelling, and placed under house arrest over the past 20 years.

It Was Just an Accident ‘has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair’, The Telegraph’s review said He shot It Was Just an Accident clandestinely in Iran after a seven-month jail term that ended in 2023 only when he went on a hunger strike.

Last year, after 14 years under a travel ban, he was finally able to leave the country to attend festival screenings of the film before returning to Iran through Turkey in the spring.

He is well known to British audiences, particularly for his 2015 film Taxi. It was shot almost entirely inside a car and portrays Mr Panahi himself driving through the streets of Tehran, posing as a share-taxi driver while his passengers hold forth on life under the Islamic Republic.

Made in defiance of an official ban on his filmmaking, it won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival – one of several works he has smuggled out of the country to international acclaim, even as the authorities sought to silence him at home.