A popular Iranian female actor has criticiզed the government in a post on Instagram, telling her almost 6 million followers that “we are not citizens” but “captives”.

Taraneh Alidoosti – who has appeared in the Oscar-nominated film “The Salesman” – made her comments on Sunday, as Iranians hit the streets in a series of anti-regime protests.

“I fought this dream for a long time and didn’t want to accept it. We are not citizens. We never were. We are captives,” she wrote, according to The Guardian.

Alidoositi said she has replaced her profile picture with the color black in mourning for demonstrators shot dead by security forces last November. The color had nothing to do with official “mourning” following the assassination on 3 January of Iran’s top general Qassem Suleimani by a US drone, she added.

The actor’s intervention comes amid reports that Iranian authorities have fired live ammunition to disperse protesters in Tehran, wounding several people. The protests broke out after the government admitted on Friday its military had accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing 176 people.

Alidoosti has previously spoken out against Donald Trump’s decision to impose visa bans on Iranians. In 2017 she boycotted the Oscar awards ceremony after The Salesman in which she starred was nominated in the best foreign language film category. The blanket ban was racist, she said.