Palme d'Or to Jafar Pahani: Iran denounces "insulting" remarks by France and summons the chargé d'affaires

The day after dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi was honored at the Cannes Film Festival, Iran summoned the French chargé d'affaires in Tehran to protest Paris's "insulting" remarks.

The 64-year-old director received the Palme d'Or on Saturday for his film "A Simple Accident," a political rant in which former prisoners are tempted to take revenge on their torturer. In defiance of the laws of the Islamic Republic, several of his actresses appear without headscarves.

Reacting to the director's award at Cannes, the head of French diplomacy, Jean-Noël Barrot, criticized the Islamic Republic in a short message published on X.

"In an act of resistance against the Iranian regime's oppression, Jafar Panahi wins a Palme d'Or that rekindles hope for all freedom fighters everywhere," he wrote.

"Following the insulting remarks and unfounded allegations made by the French Foreign Minister against Iran, the chargé d'affaires in Tehran was summoned to the ministry," the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday.

Iran condemns "the French government's misuse" of the Cannes Film Festival "to advance its political agenda against the Islamic Republic," IRNA said.

On Sunday, no official commented on the second consecration at Cannes of an Iranian, after that of Abbas Kiarostami , who died in 2016, for "The Taste of Cherry" in 1997.

A critic of the government, Jafa Panahi has been imprisoned twice in Iran: for 86 days in 2010 and for nearly seven months between 2022 and 2023. The reformist dailies Etemad, Shargh, and Ham Mihan reported factually online about the Iranian's victory without comment, while most media outlets ignored the story.

State television thus ignored the Palme d'Or, focusing on the Resistance Film Festival, an official event which rewards pro-Palestinian works or those on the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

"The travelers are going home," he wrote on Instagram on Sunday, alongside a photo of himself and the film crew.

The director is due to return to Iran on Sunday, a return he told AFP that does not "fear" him at all.