A film can meet the law in more ways than one. It can be pulled before a trial ends, because a lawyer fears a judge will read it as an attempt to sway the outcome. It can be stopped after the opening party by a provincial government. It can be shelved for years by a censor, banned and ordered destroyed by a state security apparatus, or invoked in a prosecutor’s opening statement as a way of telling jurors what kind of animal sits at the defense table. It can also become a commodity, with a convicted man negotiating over the rights to his own story. The cases below are not all horror films. Only one of them, the 1975 film Jaws, is a horror classic that a lawyer reached for in a courtroom. The rest are films about real crimes that ran into judges, censors, ministries and families, and in every case the useful question is the same: what did the court or authority actually decide?
The answer is usually less than the controversy suggests. None of the film bans or delays below was ordered by a court, and no court has ruled on the prosecutor’s comparison. The decisions that did shape what audiences saw came from lawyers giving advice, censor boards, a provincial government and an interior ministry, and some of them were never explained in public.
Abdullah Shah was a militia commander in Afghanistan’s civil war of the 1990s. In September 2002 a closed special court in Kabul convicted him of multiple murders, which the United States State Department’s human rights report described as mass murder. Afghan officials said the killings included travelers on the main route between Kabul and Jalalabad and members of his own family. He was sentenced to death and executed on April 20, 2004. It was the first execution carried out by the Afghan state after the Taliban government fell at the end of 2001, and it was made public only about a week later.
Amnesty International later described the proceeding in plain terms: a special court that denied him basic defense rights. He had no lawyer. He could not cross-examine the witnesses. The court did not investigate his claim that he had been tortured, though Amnesty said his injuries were visible, and the trial was not open to the public. Before his appeal was heard, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Fazl Shinwari, said publicly that Shah should receive the death sentence, and the State Department recorded the remark in its report for 2002. Amnesty voiced a further fear, repeated by the State Department in its 2004 report: that Shah had been executed to silence a witness to abuses by commanders who by then held positions of power.
Shah’s trial was filmed. The British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell had been commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in London to respond to the war in Afghanistan. During a two-week visit in October 2002 they were allowed into the Supreme Court in Kabul with a hand-held camera, and the trial they filmed was his. They cut the footage to a 12-minute film, Zardad’s Dog, completed in 2003. It shows a crowded, run-down courtroom with armed guards; the proceedings are in Afghan languages, but the emotions of the participants carry across. The artists felt that the people in the case and the line of witnesses seemed to stand for the Afghan people’s struggle to come to terms with the devastation of the previous 23 years.
The title comes from Shah’s nickname, which tied him to his commander, Faryadi Sarwar Zardad. It was alleged that Zardad kept Shah as a "human dog." These are allegations; Shah was never charged with them. Zardad had fled Afghanistan, reached Britain in 1998 on a false passport and claimed asylum, and was later arrested and charged in London with conspiracy to torture and conspiracy to take hostages in Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996.
That London case is what put the film in legal danger. Zardad’s first jury, in 2004, could not reach a verdict, and a retrial opened on June 8, 2005. In October 2004, a few days before the Turner Prize exhibition opened at Tate Britain, Tate and the artists were advised by Tate’s lawyers that showing the film while the trial was under way could be in contempt of court. Langlands and Bell had been nominated for the prize for the work shown with it at the Imperial War Museum’s 2003 exhibition The House of Osama bin Laden, which ran from April 10 to May 26, 2003. The film was withdrawn.
No judge ruled on it. The warning was legal advice, a precaution against a risk that no court had said was real, and it held until the case was over. On July 18, 2005, the retrial jury convicted Zardad on both counts, and the next day he was sentenced to 20 years in prison on each, to run concurrently, with a recommendation that he be deported after serving the sentence. Afghan witnesses had given evidence anonymously by satellite link, and the Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in February 2007. Tate showed Zardad’s Dog in the Lightbox space at Tate Britain from October 3 to November 3, 2005. Zardad was released and deported to Kabul in December 2016, where supporters put up banners at the airport. The Human Rights Watch researcher Patricia Gossman said Britain had let down his victims by releasing him without regard for the security of witnesses.
The two men were tried in opposite ways. Shah faced a closed court without a lawyer and was executed. Zardad faced a jury in London, where the prosecutor, James Lewis, said it was the first time torture and hostage-taking had been prosecuted in such circumstances in any country, and he was later freed. The film about the first trial waited for the second to end.
In the last days of November 1999 a letter reached police in Lahore, Pakistan. Its writer, Javed Iqbal, said he had killed 100 boys. Time magazine quoted it a few weeks later: "I have killed 100 children, all boys." He surrendered at the Lahore office of the Urdu daily Jang on December 30, 1999. On March 16, 2000, an additional sessions judge in Lahore convicted him on 100 counts of murder and 100 counts of causing disappearance of evidence.
The sentence the judge passed drew criticism within days from the government, from human rights lawyers and from Pakistan’s top religious advisory body. Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said the government would challenge it, because such a punishment was not permitted under the human rights convention Pakistan had signed. The lawyer Asma Jahangir called it "barbaric." On March 27, 2000, the state-run Council of Islamic Ideology ruled that it "violates the tenets of Islam." Even the prosecutor later said that it breached human rights law. The sentence was never carried out.
On October 9, 2001, while his appeal was still waiting to be heard, Iqbal and a co-accused died in custody at Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore. Prison officials said they had died by suicide; police investigators and doctors doubted the official account. No findings of a medical board or inquiry have been made public. Because he died with his appeal pending, no appeal court ever ruled on his guilt. In April 2007 the Federal Shariat Court acquitted the two juvenile co-accused whose appeals had been lodged separately. The trial judgment stands as the only judgment against Iqbal.
A feature film about the case came 20 years later. Javed Iqbal: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer, written and directed by Abu Aleeha, with Yasir Hussain as Iqbal and Ayesha Omar as a police officer who questions him, premiered in Karachi on January 25, 2022, and was due to open across the country on January 28. Aleeha said the Punjab government, then led by Chief Minister Usman Buzdar, stopped the film’s release in that province after the censor board had approved it. The producers said they would go to the Lahore High Court. Another account holds that the Central Board of Film Censors never approved the film for local cinemas at all, so it was effectively banned before release. The censor board’s chairperson declined to comment.
While it was blocked at home the film won best actor and best director at the UK Asian Film Festival in May 2022 and was selected for the DC South Asian Film Festival in Washington that November. In March 2023 it was renamed with a one-word title, the name by which acquaintances knew Iqbal, after the censors said the original title made it sound as though the character was being glorified. A closing message explaining the film’s purpose was added. Aleeha said the film was meant to make parents aware that people who seem normal can threaten children, and that it did not glorify the character or his crimes. After censor clearance in April 2023, the film opened in cinemas in June 2023.
The result is a precise record of who decided what. A trial court convicted. A government and a censor board controlled the screen. No court has ruled on the 2022 film, and the producers' plan to go to the Lahore High Court is not known to have gone further.
Between January 1976 and March 1977 ten people were killed in six incidents in Pune, then written Poona. In a sessions trial known as the Joshi-Abhyankar Massacre case, four commercial art students, Rajendra Jakkal, Dilip Dhyanoba Sutar, Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap and Munawar Harun Shah, were convicted of ten murders, with robbery and dacoity, in pursuance of a criminal conspiracy. They were sentenced to death on September 28, 1978. The Bombay High Court confirmed the sentences on April 6, 1979, and the Supreme Court of India dismissed the special leave petitions on November 17, 1980. A further set of writ petitions was decided by the Supreme Court on April 18, 1983, reported as AIR 1983 SC 585. The four were executed together at Yerwada Central Jail in 1983, on November 27 in one account and October 25 in another.
The law reports carry Shah’s name; later retellings on screen carry Jakkal’s. Vivek Wagh’s Marathi documentary Jakkal won the award for best investigative film among non-feature films at the 67th National Film Awards, for films of 2019. He then spent four years on a dramatized Marathi web series, also titled Jakkal, for Jio Studios, and described a Pune known as a pensioners' paradise and cultural capital that was frightened by the killings. He framed the series around whether Jakkal was only a surname or an instinct that drove the young men to kill.
The older film is the legal story. Paanch, the first feature directed by Anurag Kashyap, with Kay Kay Menon in its cast, is based on the 1976 to 1977 killings, India’s Central Board of Film Certification objected to its violence, its depiction of drug use and its strong language, and the film was shelved in 2003. The producer, Tutu Sharma, later said the censor issues had been resolved but that other difficulties kept the film on the shelf, and that it would be restored and released. The authority that decided here was an administrative board, and the decision was that the film could not be shown as made. No court is known to have been involved in the shelving, and the film was said to be coming to cinemas after 22 years.
Steven Dean Gordon and Franc Cano were both on GPS ankle monitors, imposed after earlier crimes, when four women were killed in Santa Ana and Anaheim, California, between October 2013 and March 2014: Kianna Jackson, 20; Josephine Monique Vargas, 34; Martha Anaya, 28; and Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, 21. A grand jury indicted both men on October 2, 2014. The location data from their monitors, and the women’s own cellphone records, helped prosecutors tie them to the women.
Gordon chose to act as his own lawyer. The trial opened in Santa Ana on November 16, 2016, and the prosecutor, Senior Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin, reached for a film. He compared the case to the 1975 movie Jaws. "'Jaws' is about a predator," he told the jury. "This case is about two. You are about to see the hunt." The comparison was a shorthand for two men working together, delivered in the first minutes of the trial.
Gordon’s own argument was different. He blamed Cano, called him "a predator" and said, "In no way am I a saint, but I have a conscience." He told the jury that he had changed his mind about killing Estepp, "but that doesn’t change the fact she’s not alive." He said he believed Cano had killed more than four women. The jury deliberated for about an hour on December 15, 2016, before convicting him of four counts of first degree murder, and made true findings on the special circumstances of murder during a kidnapping and multiple murders, which made him eligible for the death penalty.
The penalty phase followed. On December 21, 2016, minutes before the jury announced its decision, the judge considered removing a juror who had said she could not vote for death; Gordon, still acting as his own lawyer, asked that she be removed, saying that if she stayed and the other 11 voted for death he believed the case would be overturned and he did not want that. The jury recommended death, and Gordon was sentenced to death on February 3, 2017. On December 15, 2022, Cano pleaded guilty to the four murders and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In December 2022 Gordon’s automatic appeal was still pending, and no court has ruled on the prosecutor’s comparison. A film comparison in an opening statement is a rhetorical choice. A jury convicted on the evidence that came after it.
Erwin Hagedorn, a trainee cook from Eberswalde, a town north-east of Berlin in what was then East Germany, killed two nine-year-old boys, Henry S. and Mario L., on May 31, 1969, when he was 17, and a 12-year-old, Ronald W., in October 1971. He was arrested in Eberswalde on November 12, 1971. His trial opened before the district court in Frankfurt (Oder) on May 9, 1972, and on May 15 he was sentenced to death for murder and for attempted or prepared murder. The sentence was upheld by the GDR Supreme Court, Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the Council of State, refused clemency in the summer, and Hagedorn was executed in Leipzig on September 15, 1972.
The state that executed him also wanted the case kept out of sight. Polizeiruf 110, the crime series of East German state television, was overseen by the Interior Ministry, which was responsible for the People’s Police. In 1974 the Cottbus writer Dorothea Kleine produced a treatment based on the Hagedorn case under the working title "Am hellerlichten Tag." Television programmers judged the first script too close to a real offense, and the director, Heinz Seibert, wrote a new version, which was filmed from September 10 to November 13, 1974, in Berlin and Brandenburg under the title "Im Alter von ..." Peter Borgelt and Jürgen Frohriep played the series' regular investigators. The fictional story moved away from the facts of the real case.
It did not help. A ban order dated April 4, 1975, stopped the film and directed that all material be destroyed. The Interior Ministry judged the episode too explosive, because it showed a crime that officially could not exist in real socialism; no formal reason was published at the time. A rough cut, a copy, recordings and every copy of the script were destroyed. The film had never been shown.
One thing survived. The silent camera negative escaped the destruction, passed into the holdings of the dissolving broadcaster DFF after reunification, and was rediscovered in 2009 at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Babelsberg, under a cellar staircase. In the same year the author Thomas Gaevert turned up a copy of the script. Because the soundtrack was lost and several of the original actors had died, the film was completed in 2011 under the director Hans Werner, with current Polizeiruf actors dubbing the original cast from the script and Rainer Oleak composing new music. It was broadcast for the first time on June 23, 2011, at 8:15 p.m., on MDR, 36 years after the ban, followed by a documentary on 40 years of the series.
The authority that decided here was neither a court nor a censor board in the usual sense. It was the ministry in charge of the police, acting on a series that existed to show the police at work, and the decision was that the subject could not be shown. The ban is the better documented episode of the case; the film’s own plot is a footnote to it. A later television drama, Mord in Eberswalde, written by Holger Karsten Schmidt and directed by Stephan Wagner for WDR, with Ronald Zehrfeld as a fictional People’s Police investigator, was broadcast by ARD on January 30, 2013. It treats the 1969 killings as a historical criminal case, and the Grimme-Institut recognized its writer, director, production designer and two of its actors.
Charles Sobhraj, a French citizen born in Saigon in 1944, was arrested in Kathmandu in September 2003, days after a Himalayan Times story reported that he was living in the city. Nepali police charged him with the 1975 murders of Connie Jo Bronzich, an American, and Laurent Carrière, a Canadian. A Kathmandu court convicted him of the Bronzich murder on August 12, 2004; the Patan Appellate Court upheld the conviction on August 4, 2005, and the Supreme Court upheld it on July 30, 2010. A second Nepali court convicted him of the Carrière murder in 2014. He has always denied it. "I have never killed anybody in my life," he told Al Jazeera in 2023.
The UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted its views on his case on July 27, 2010, three days before the Supreme Court ruled. It held that the Kathmandu District Court and the Patan Appellate Court had shifted the burden of proof to his detriment, in violation of the presumption of innocence, and that Nepal had also violated the covenant’s provisions on fair trial, on the treatment of prisoners and on retroactive criminal liability, because he had been required to prove that he had not entered Nepal in 1975. The committee asked Nepal for an effective remedy, including a speedy end to the proceedings and compensation. Nepal rejected the complaint, telling the committee in early 2011 that its courts' independence could not be questioned.
On December 21, 2022, the Supreme Court of Nepal ordered his release on a habeas corpus petition, holding that rules allowing up to 75 percent of a sentence to be waived for prisoners over 65 applied to foreigners too and that he had already served 95 percent of his 20-year term. He was released on December 23, 2022, after 19 years, three months and seven days, and deported to France that evening, barred from Nepal for 10 years.
Then came a contest over his story. In February 2023 the French publisher L’Archipel brought out his memoir, Moi, le Serpent, co-written with the filmmaker Jean-Charles Deniau, who also made a documentary with his cooperation. Deniau told Al Jazeera that not all of what Sobhraj says is true and that "a great part is fiction." Sobhraj declined to say how much he was paid for the book. He said he was negotiating series and film contracts from a base in London, and said of the eight-part 2021 series about him from Netflix and the BBC: "We are going to sue Netflix and BBC for The Serpent because they have made the series." He said his lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, would also take Nepal before the UN committee. A Nepali police official, Ganesh KC, told Al Jazeera: "He wants media publicity because he wants to make big money."
No court has ruled on any of those threatened claims, and the Nepal convictions stand. The film fight is, for now, a statement of intent, and the rights to his story remain a matter between him, his publishers and the people who have already made films about him.
Set side by side, the decisions are narrower than the controversies. Tate’s lawyers advised that a film could amount to contempt, and Tate withdrew it; no court said so. A provincial government stopped a film in Punjab, and a censor board later said a title sounded as though it glorified its subject; neither ruling is a court judgment, and the second was met by renaming. India’s film certification board shelved a debut feature over violence, drug use and language, and it was held for more than two decades. East Germany’s interior ministry banned a police series episode and ordered it destroyed, which only a lucky negative defeated. A prosecutor compared two defendants to a shark in a film, and a jury convicted, as juries do, on what it was shown. A convicted man’s plan to sue the makers of a series remains a plan.
The courts in these cases decided the crimes: a Kabul court, a Lahore judge, a Pune sessions court, an Orange County jury, a Frankfurt (Oder) bench, a Kathmandu court and a London jury. The films decided nothing. What they did was make the older decisions visible again, sometimes decades later, and in every case the argument about the film was an argument about who was allowed to tell the story of a crime that a court had already judged.
• 1969, May 31: two boys are killed in Eberswalde, East Germany.
• 1972, May 15: Erwin Hagedorn is sentenced to death; he is executed in Leipzig on September 15.
• 1974, September to November: the Polizeiruf 110 episode "Im Alter von ..." is shot in Berlin and Brandenburg.
• 1975, April 4: the ban order stops the film and directs that all material be destroyed.
• 1976 to 1977: ten murders in six incidents in Pune.
• 1978, September 28: Jakkal and three co-accused are sentenced to death in Pune; they are executed at Yerwada in 1983.
• 1999, December 30: Javed Iqbal surrenders at a newspaper office in Lahore.
• 2000, March 16: Iqbal is convicted on 100 counts of murder and 100 counts of causing disappearance of evidence.
• 2001, October 9: Iqbal and a co-accused die in Kot Lakhpat jail with his appeal pending.
• 2002, September to October: Abdullah Shah is convicted and sentenced to death in Kabul; the artists film his Supreme Court trial.
• 2003, April 10 to May 26: Zardad’s Dog is first shown at the Imperial War Museum; Paanch is shelved by India’s film certification board in the same year.
• 2004, April 20: Shah is executed. October: Zardad’s Dog is withdrawn from the Turner Prize show.
• 2005, July 18: Zardad is convicted in London. October 3 to November 3: the film is shown at Tate Britain.
• 2010, July 27 and 30: the UN Human Rights Committee adopts its views on Sobhraj; Nepal’s Supreme Court upholds his conviction.
• 2011, June 23: the banned East German film is broadcast for the first time.
• 2016, December 15: Steven Dean Gordon is convicted; sentenced to death on February 3, 2017.
• 2022, January 25 to 28: the Javed Iqbal film premieres in Karachi and is stopped in Punjab.
• 2022, December 23: Sobhraj is released in Nepal and deported to France.
• 2023, March to June: the Javed Iqbal film is renamed, cleared and released in cinemas.