Keywan Karimi

On December 14, 2013 at 8 a.m. the Revolutionary Guard showed up at Keywan’s house with an arrest warrant. They took him, his hard drives and other confiscated materials to Evin Prison where he was interrogated and kept in solitary confinement for two weeks. On December 26, 2013 Keywan was released on $100.000 bail. Between March 2014 and September 2015 Keywan made eight court appearances to fight his case, regardless of any of the evidence he provided. On October 13, 2015 he was sentenced by the Islamic Revolutionary Court to six years imprisonment and 223 lashings for “propagating against the ruling system” and “insulting religious sanctities, Accused of insulting the regime after a music clip and documentary film. "Writing on the City" Is a 60 minutes documentary film which employs the unusual and unique angle of focusing on slogans written on the wall and Graffiti in Tehran city.

"Writing on the City an excellent documentary on the evolution of graffiti in Tehran over the last three decades plus. With his "Writing on the City", Keywan had brought the narrative of those graffiti down to the aftermath of the Green Movement of 2008 with an acute sense of history and aesthetics." Hamid Dabashi Author and Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University wrote in an article in "Al Jazeera", after he watched the Writing on the City.

Keywan Karimi (Persian: کیوان کریمی ‎ ; born 21 September 1985) is an Iranian independent filmmaker of Kurdish origin. He graduated with ad degree communication studies form the Faculty of Social Sciences University of Tehran. Karimi began his work with a series of short documentary films which were a critique of human life in contemporary Iran. He was sentenced to six years in prison and 223 lashes because of the content of his films.