At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, the eyes of the actress, Juliet Binoche, were luminous with her quintessential innocence as she rested her award on the podium to hold up the name of the imprisoned Iranian film director and Green Movement sympathizer, Jafar Pahani, to plead for his freedom.

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The festival had hardly ended when Panahi was released on $200,000 bail, and I realized that perhaps hope shines as brightly as innocence. While Binoche cannot singlehandedly be credited with Panahi’s release, she surely deserves co-directorial title. My hat goes off to her!

The news from Iran’s prisons is usually bleak, making the handful of miraculous tales that have defied the pattern worth pondering. Another success story worth revisiting happened in the fall of 1996, when Faraj Sarkouhi, the editor in chief of Iran’s most celebrated literary monthly, went missing. Having arrived at Tehran’s airport to board a flight to Germany, he seemed to have stepped into an abyss, sometime after he reached the tarmac and before his plane touched down on the other continent. The customs records documented his departure from Iran, but his family, expecting his arrival in Frankfurt, never received him.

Official Iranian press treated the incident as a mystery but the public did not buy it, and rightly so. Within days, a wrenching letter surfaced. The editor had written it in a rushed scrawl, bemoaning his captivity at the hands of the Ministry of Intelligence, which had snatched him away from the stairs of the plane. Still, the regime went on to deny that he was in their custody. Then a most unexpected event forced the hands of the captors. The global insurance company that covered Iran’s flights while airborne threatened to terminate its contract, citing the disappearance as evidence that Iran Air was unfit for coverage. The termination would have brought all international air travel — cargo and passenger, both to and from Tehran — to a halt.

Hours later, the missing man was found! Appearing even more gaunt and ashen than usual, the editor stood before a cadre of reporters and announced that he had accidently lost his way and strayed from the airport in the direction of Armenia for the past two weeks! Even in Iran, where absurdity was accepted governmental practice, the outrageous assertion, redefining Kafkaesque as Tehranesque, set a new record.

My wise fellow blogger, James Kirchick, does not have such celebrity cases in mind when he voices his pessimism about the effectiveness of protest campaigns in stopping Tehran’s execution plans. Though I more than share his skepticism, these examples show that certain pressures do move even the most immovable. The world cannot ask Tehran to end its abuses — it’d be asking a vulture not to circle the air above a bleeding prey. But pressure can limit the scope and lessen the extent of those abuses. While global protest campaigns will not force the clerics out of power, they can at least end the open season on political prisoners in Iran.

Just as pressure on Iran’s nuclear program has hampered the regime, sending its leaders to the far-flung corners of the globe to seek the intervention of allies, so can pressure on the regime’s abuses be effective. Letter writing, among other efforts, as part of a broader campaign to exert pressure on Iran’s disregard for the human rights of its citizens, is something that everyone rooting for change in Iran can do to help the movement within. While the regime’s bullets can kill a few, silence and anonymity in the face of such executions can kill the thousands of spirits who are working for change in Iran.