In a bleak week, two artists have been sen­tenced to jail time

Even as protests have bro­ken out across the Unit­ed States and Unit­ed King­dom in protest of state-sanc­tioned vio­lence against pri­vate indi­vid­u­als, a pair of inci­dents over the past week have remind­ed us that the issue is not lim­it­ed to police bru­tal­i­ty. In two sep­a­rate coun­tries, oppres­sion has come from the top down as gov­ern­ments have threat­ened out­spo­ken film artists with jail time.

First, the Russ­ian film­mak­er Kir­ill Sere­bren­nikov was ruled guilty of fraud and embez­zle­ment in a high­ly pub­li­cized tri­al on Thurs­day in Moscow, Dead­line reports. His trou­bles with the law date back to 2017, when the ardent crit­ic of the church and Vladimir Putin’s admin­is­tra­tion was first accused of fun­nel­ing mon­ey out of an arts fund he had been entrust­ed to man­age. He was placed under an 18-month house arrest, which kept him from pre­sent­ing his film Leto in Com­pe­ti­tion at the 2018 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, where DIY shirts embla­zoned with ​‘FREE KIR­ILL’ were a not uncom­mon sight.

His con­fine­ment end­ed in April, 2019, but only this week was it decid­ed that he would be hand­ed a three-year sus­pend­ed sen­tence. (A term mean­ing that if he can go the next three years with­out doing any­thing to incur the wrath of Russ­ian appa­ratchiks, he will not be forced to serve hard time.) While this may seem like a ges­ture of lenien­cy to those expect­ing a harsh­er pun­ish­ment, Serebrennikov’s many sup­port­ers see it more as a government’s effort to silence one of its loud­est dissidents.

A sim­i­lar sequence of events played out in Iran last Fri­day, as the actress Taraneh Ali­doosti was charged with ​“pro­pa­gan­da activ­i­ties against the state” and ​“insult­ing law enforce­ment,” result­ing in a deferred sen­tence. (An item in The Hol­ly­wood Reporter explains that in her case, she will have to remain in the good graces of Iran­ian offi­cials for two years, on penal­ty of a five-month stint in prison.) Her crime? Post­ing a video on social media in which one of Iran’s so-called ​“moral­i­ty police” phys­i­cal­ly harass­es a woman for being out in pub­lic with­out her hijab.

The actress, a glob­al­ly rec­og­nized tal­ent for her appear­ances in the films of Asghar Farha­di, has long brought a polit­i­cal bent to her celebri­ty; she made waves in 2016 for reveal­ing a tat­too with fem­i­nist sig­nif­i­cance, and when Don­ald Trump’s trav­el visa ban pre­vent­ed Farha­di from attend­ing the Acad­e­my Awards in 2017 on behalf of The Sales­man, she also boy­cotted the cer­e­mo­ny in sol­i­dar­i­ty. The puni­tive mea­sures tak­en by the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment recall their treat­ment of Jafar Panahi, anoth­er artist with sub­ver­sive lean­ings who’s faced impris­on­ment and house arrest for his beliefs.

These two unre­lat­ed hap­pen­ings nonethe­less stem from the same author­i­tar­i­an spir­it, a ris­ing tide of repres­sive con­ser­vatism that extends far past this cor­ner of the world. The West likes to think of itself as being above the cen­sor­ship of free cre­ative expres­sion, but the trou­bling real­i­ty is that if a bull­ish strong­man such as Don­ald Trump or Boris John­son thought they could get away with some­thing like this, they would prob­a­bly give it a try.

The fight for an unim­ped­ed cin­e­ma is a fight we all share, because it is a fight for free­dom itself. Artists and aca­d­e­mics have always been the canaries in the coal mine of fas­cism – if they go, every­one else will be soon to follow.