With the people of Iran now targeted by the goons currently running the United States and Israel, Donald Trump’s recent and explicit threat to destroy their very “civilization” has only lent even more agony to it all. The word conjurs the potential loss of a truly great five-thousand-year legacy in architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry. I feel a particular pang for Iranian cinema, which was already severely impaired by the repressive dictatorship of the Islamic Republic, with many filmmakers imprisoned or forced into exile.

However, important films continue to get made, often by expatriates. Jafar Panahi, for example, has been banned from filmmaking in Iran for the past twenty years and has been imprisoned several times. But he continues to work in France and to test the authority of the ayatollahs by periodic returns to Iran. His most recent film, It Was Just an Accident, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was a nominee for the Best International Feature Film Oscar at the Ninety-Eighth Academy Awards.

Panahi stated that, after the awards campaign, he intended to return to Iran, though he’s facing a one-year prison sentence. “If they want to put me back in prison, I’ll go,” he said back in February. “I’ll go to prison, and I’ll come out with a new script.” It was recently reported that he’d entered the country on March 31 “by land via Turkey due to flight restrictions.”