800 film industry figures condemn Iran’s attack on protestors: “Massacre”
Around 800 film professionals, including Marion Cotillard, Juliette Binoche, and Yorgos Lanthimos, have signed a statement condemning the Iranian government’s crackdown on protestors. The statement also calls out Tehran’s killing and torturing of its own people.
At the end of 2025, multiple demonstrations erupted across Iran amid nationwide unrest against the Islamic Republic government, leading to the known death of at least 28 protesters. Since January 8th, a near-total internet blackout has been imposed on the region.
The statement (per Deadline) begins, “We, the undersigned, with anger, grief, and a deep sense of moral responsibility, condemn in the strongest possible terms the organised crimes committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran against protesting civilians.”
Exiled Iranian figures Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Golshifteh Farahani, and Sepideh Farsi are also included in the list of professionals who have signed.
Reacting to the “widespread and peaceful protests of the Iranian people against repression, poverty, discrimination, and structural injustice”, the statement posits that the “Islamic Republic has chosen not to listen to the voices of its people, but to respond with live ammunition, mass killings, widespread arrests, torture, enforced disappearances, and a nationwide shutdown of the internet.”
It goes on to reference “credible sources” which state that “more than three thousand defenceless citizens, including women, adolescents, and children, have been killed.” Other human rights groups suggest that up to 16,000 have been killed.
It reads that the suppression of media, which prevents the documentation of truth, “represents a blatant and systematic violation of all fundamental human rights, including the right to life, liberty, human dignity, and security, and constitutes a clear case of crimes against humanity.”
Filmmakers, artists, and cultural activists, it writes, have a “responsibility to document, narrate, and preserve historical memory.” Therefore, “we consider silence to be complicity in crime. No political power has the right to massacre its own people in order to preserve itself or to silence the truth.”
Therefore, the statement calls “upon independent international institutions, film festivals, cultural and artistic institutions and the global community of filmmakers and artist to publicly and concretely condemn these crimes, to reassess and reconsider their relationships with official institutions of the Islamic Republic, and to support the struggle of the people of Iran for freedom, human dignity, and all inherent and inalienable human rights.”
It finishes with the clear message: “Let us not remain silent. Let us not forget. Let us document the truth. Woman, Life, Freedom.”
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