Jafar Panahi implores the public to take notice of Iran: “A massacre is coming”
Iranian film director Jafar Panahi has implored the public to take notice of the mass protests taking place in the country, warning, “A massacre is coming”.
The It Was Just An Accident filmmaker was speaking in a new interview with The Wrap when he made the impassioned plea in light of the anti-government regime protests, which have spread across the country and reportedly killed over 2,000 people, according to Reuters.
His film, which is inspired by his own time being held as a prisoner in Iran for spreading what the regime claimed was anti-government propaganda, was most recently nominated for four awards at the 2026 Golden Globes, including ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama’.
However, as Panahi was appearing in Hollywood, his home country was descending into mass protests, with a blackout on communications and internet having been enforced since last week.
“The Islamic Republic has entirely lost its legitimacy, and now there is no more doubt of that,” the director said, adding, “It appears that the regime is finding itself at a dead end, and the protests this year seem to be the most important of anything that’s happened all these years, and because it is about its existence or non-existence, it is going to do anything.”
Explaining the starkness of the communication issues, he continued: “The internet and the phones are all shut down. We cannot call cell phones or landlines; everything is disconnected. When they shut down the internet completely, we knew what was going on: it means a massacre is coming.”
Panahi was recently sentenced to another one-year prison sentence in Iran in absentia, which he is currently in on ongoing process of appealing. He has said he will return to Iran once he has finished promoting It Was Just An Accident in other countries.
The protests were sparked in late December originally over the height of rampant inflation, where the cost of basic goods either rapidly spiked or became completely absent from the shelves.
However, this soon transformed and spread across the country by voicing dissent towards the general regime and particularly Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These protests are some of the largest and most significant in Iranian history, with many experts believing it could possibly signal regime change.
US President Donald Trump has weighed in on the situation, vowing to attack Iran if the regime meets protestors with violence, and has imposed 25 per cent tariffs on countries doing business deals with Iran, per BBC News.
In terms of the message that Panahi wants to send, he implored the public to take notice of the situation in the country. “I don’t know what can be done,” he said. “But we are in a situation that anyone and everyone around the world – journalists, citizens, politicians, anybody – can do something. Anything they can do, they must.”
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