The director, who was arrested in July, is released from Evin prison in Tehran.
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been released on bail after starting a hunger strike in protest against his almost seven-month detention.
However, Panahi is out on bail and his case will be reviewed in March, so the release could just be temporary, according to several sources.
The director had been arrested months before the current anti-regime protests erupted, but his imprisonment became a symbol of the plight of artists speaking out against the authorities.
Panahi was arrested in early July 2022, before the current wave of protests, after he went to Evin to protest over the detention days earlier of two filmmaker colleagues, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad.
It was announced a few days later that the Iranian authorities had decided to reactivate a six-year sentence originally meted out to Panahi in 2010 alongside a 20-year filmmaking and travel ban.
On October 15, the Supreme Court quashed the conviction and ordered a retrial, raising hopes among his legal team that he could be released, but he remained in prison.
Panahi won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2000 for his film The Circle. In 2015, he won the Golden Bear in Berlin for Taxi Tehran, and in 2018, he won the best screenplay prize at Cannes for Three Faces.
