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Jafar Panahi returns to Iran in triumph after Cannes Palme d’Or win

The director of It Was Just an Accident was cheered by supporters as he arrived back in his home country, where his work has previously landed him in jail

With some supporters concerned that Panahi could face trouble on his return to Iran, he arrived without incident at Tehran’s main international airport, named after the founder of the 1979 Islamic revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in the early hours of Monday. He was immediately cheered by supporters waiting in the public area as he descended the escalator from passport control to baggage collection, footage posted by the Dadban legal monitor on social media showed. French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot called his victory “a gesture of resistance against the Iranian regime’s oppression” in a post on X, prompting Tehran to summon France’s chargé d’affaires to protest against the “insulting” comments.

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