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World-famous Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi is the guest of honor at the ongoing Golden Apricot International Film Festival (GAIFF) in Yerevan, the festival reported on Wednesday.

This will be Panahi’s first festival visit after 14 years of imprisonment and house arrest and in the year of Parajanov’s 100th anniversary Golden Apricot will honor Panahi with a Special Parajanov Thaler, thus uniting the two artists with a shared fate.

It was Panahi and other masters such as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Dariush Mehrjui that were responsible for the great explosion of Iranian cinema in the 1980-90’s, which continues to bear fruit up to this day.

Panahi is one of few directors to have received both the Locarno Film Festival Golden Leopard and Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, as well as the Berlinale Golden Bear and even the Camera d’Or in Cannes for Best Debut.

Despite the house arrest, Panahi continued to make films even when he was specifically prohibited from doing so, and this desire for freedom is evident in his films in terms of not only their subject matters, but especially their innovative style that knows no bounds.