Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled a prison and flogging sentence in his home country, was awarded a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his tale of a court investigator whose family life is torn apart during anti-government protests.
In accepting the award in the French resort town, the 51-year-old Rasoulof said his heart was with his film crew, who were "still under the pressure of the secret services back in Iran."
The special jury prize was given to Rasoulof for "drawing attention to unsustainable injustice" in Iran, organizers said after a screening of the film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, led to a 12-minute ovation.
The festival's top prize, meanwhile, went to the film Anora, a sensual drama and comedy about an exotic dancer who becomes involved with a Russian oligarch's son.
Earlier at a news conference, Rasoulof recalled how he had to decide within hours whether to go into exile or serve a prison sentence, saying it was still difficult to talk about.
"I had to say to myself, well, do I want to be in prison, or should I leave Iran, geographic Iran, and join the cultural Iran that exists beyond its borders?" said Rasoulof, who is an outspoken critic of repression in Iran and has twice served prison terms.
Iran’s judiciary sentenced Rasoulof to flogging and eight years in prison after he was convicted of "collusion against national security," his lawyer, Babak Paknia, said on May 8.
Details of his escape from Iran are not totally known. He said the action was plotted by using contacts he had made during his prison stays.
"The more you spend time with interrogators, the secret police, the more you learn how to thwart them," he told the AFP news agency at Cannes.
"They show you your emails, so you learn how to write them. They show you your bank statements, so you learn when you should not have used your credit card."
Rasoulof said he also came up with the idea for The Seed Of The Sacred Fig while in prison.
Western rights advocates and film-industry groups had condemned Iran’s actions against Rasoulof and demanded his release.
Rasoulof won the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize in 2020 for his film There Is No Evil, which tells four stories loosely connected to the themes of the death penalty in Iran and personal freedoms under oppression.
"I am also very sad, deeply sad, to see the disaster experienced by my people every day...the Iranian people live under a totalitarian regime," he said in Cannes.