Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi ordered to serve 6-year prison sentence

Jafar Panahi, Iran's best-known filmmaker, has been ordered to serve a six-year prison sentence.

Masoud Setayeshi, the spokesman for Iran's judiciary, announced that the award-winning director would fulfill his six-year prison term handed down in 2011 on charges of producing anti-government propaganda, a final verdict that he said should have been implemented at the time.

The Taxi-filmmaker was detailed last week when he visited the Tehran prosecutor's office to inquire about the cases of fellow detained dissident filmmakers, Mohamad Rasoulof and Mostafa al-Ahmad, who were accused of "inciting unrest and disrupting the psychological security of society".

Commenting on the detention Panahi's wife, Tahereh Saeedi, told BBC Persian, "Jafar has some rights as a citizen. There's due process. To imprison someone, they need to be summoned first. But to imprison someone who is protesting outside the jail raises a lot of questions. This is a kidnapping."

Panahi's works include acclaimed titles such as The White Balloon (1995), The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000), and Crimson's Gold (2003), to name a few. More recently, he directed a segment in the anthology, The Year of the Everlasting Storm.