This text appeared within the Might 23, 2025 version of The Movie Remark Letter, our free weekly e-newsletter that includes authentic movie criticism and writing. Join the Letter right here.

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025)

Essentially the most momentous event at this yr’s Cannes was neither Tom Cruise’s red-carpet arrival nor Denzel Washington’s shock honorary Palme d’Or—it was the return of Jafar Panahi to the Croisette after 22 years. The premiere of his newest movie, It Was Just an Accident, within the Official Competitors additionally marked the primary time in 15 years that the Iranian director was capable of attend a public screening of considered one of his personal motion pictures. Following greater than 20 years characterised by censorship and persecution—together with imprisonment, home arrests, and filmmaking and journey bans—Panahi’s reprieve got here in February 2023, when he was launched from jail after his conviction for “propaganda” was overturned, lastly permitting him to stay and journey extra freely. It additionally enabled him to return to directing movies with out the complicated and dangerous ranges of subterfuge that each one his options since 2011’s This Is Not a Movie have concerned.

These motion pictures, together with 2015’s Taxi, 2018’s 3 Faces, and 2022’s No Bears, turned meta-reflexively on the sensible and moral questions inherent to filmmaking below a ban. It Was Just an Accident departs from that template with a extra easy neorealist narrative: the wrenching—however typically darkly humorous—thriller follows a motley crew of former political prisoners who abduct a person, believing him to be the intelligence officer who tortured and interrogated them behind bars, and agonize over painful and conflicting impulses of bloodlust, grief, uncertainty, and worry whereas driving in and round Tehran. But though Panahi doesn’t himself seem in It Was Just an Accident, as he’s accomplished in his different current movies, that is clearly a strikingly private story concerning the formidable problem of constant life after experiencing the horrors of state repression.

The day after It Was Just an Accident premiered at Cannes, I interviewed Panahi concerning the movie’s making, aided by an interpreter who translated between Farsi and English. Two days later, it was introduced that Panahi’s movie had gained the Palme d’Or.

You’ve gotten been capable of come again to Cannes after a really very long time. How are you feeling proper now, being right here? What was it like being on the premiere?

It’s been 15 years since I used to be final capable of watch a movie of mine with an viewers. I didn’t even know if this connection would occur between the viewers, the movie, and myself once more. It’s like the primary time once more. In a manner, I had forgotten my earlier experiences with an viewers. So it was extraordinarily shifting, not just for myself—on the finish, on the big display screen, I noticed my actors [in the audience] crying. That was very particular.

Your current movies have been made below restrictions, and due to this fact have been very self-reflexive. They have been about cinema, but additionally about filmmaking below numerous constraints. You developed such a powerful language of cinema below censorship. What’s it prefer to return to a freer cinema now, in any case these years?

It’s extra on a psychological degree that it makes a distinction, as a result of I used to be banned from filmmaking for 20 years, which in fact made me extra introspective and made me take into consideration my very own scenario. It doesn’t matter what I considered, it introduced me again to myself. Even when I needed to make a movie a few taxi driver, I noticed the taxi driver like myself, a movie director who can’t stay from his craft and begins driving automobiles, and listens to individuals or observes individuals by means of his job. I couldn’t run away from my scenario.

However as quickly because the ban was lifted, I got here again to the scenario of any director who can work below sure circumstances, and who can journey. However it didn’t make an actual distinction as a result of what may I’ve accomplished? Might I’m going and ask for permission to make this movie? After all they wouldn’t have given me the permission. However a minimum of psychologically, I didn’t really feel I used to be nonetheless below the ban; I wasn’t obsessive about myself, or with my previous scenario. I used to be capable of open up, and to dedicate my work, my movie, to the individuals I had frolicked with in jail.

Vehicles have been a significant function of Iranian cinema—your cinema, the flicks of Abbas Kiarostami, and even your son Panah Panahi’s movie Hit the Highway (2021). I believed it was attention-grabbing that this movie can be set largely in a shifting automobile.

I don’t know the place it comes from. I keep in mind that sooner or later, Iranian administrators made quite a lot of movies about kids, and other people requested, “Why do you make movies about kids?” Now it’s about automobiles. “Why do you make movies in automobiles?” It doesn’t matter what we alter, there’ll at all times be questions on why we selected this subject or location. However I feel while you’re making underground cinema, being in a automotive offers you [at least] a minimal degree of safety. It’s simpler to cover from the intelligence brokers. However I didn’t make this movie a few automotive or a van; I feel solely 20 or 30 % truly takes place contained in the automobile. It’s simply the hyperlink between completely different sequences. What else may I select for his or her motion? I ought to have set it within the nineteenth century and made them use camels or carts! [laughs]

It’s humorous you talked about kids, as a result of I did need to ask about that; I’m sorry! Though this movie shouldn’t be about kids, the opening sequence roots it in a baby’s morality. A toddler makes a remark about whether or not an accident is God’s doing or the character’s, and that concept returns on the finish in a extra profound manner. 

It’s perhaps a cliché to say this, but it surely’s about hope for the brand new era. Within the “Girl, Life, Freedom” motion, it was the younger era that got here and broke all the foundations—in such a manner that now there’s a “earlier than Mahsa Amini” and “after Mahsa Amini” in modern Iran.

I learn that you simply have been stopped by the police while you have been taking pictures the movie, however as a result of the presidential elections have been going on, they didn’t intervene a lot—for worry of unhealthy press. Are you able to say slightly extra concerning the political scenario whilst you have been making the movie?

Usually, you must work in a short time while you do an underground movie, as a result of they will at all times come and cease you. So we have been working in a short time, and it was virtually the top of the shoot once they got here. They weren’t capable of pay money for any of our rushes or our supplies, so that they needed to depart us alone. They threatened lots of the members of the forged and crew, and informed them that they needed to cease working on this venture. They didn’t know that it was virtually wrapped. They thought that we nonetheless had so much to do.

A whole lot of movies about political prisoners are concerning the arrest, the torture, what it’s like in jail. To consider what comes after all that feels unimaginable. So to see a movie about life after incarceration feels very highly effective. Are you able to speak about that?

Life positively goes on, however [that experience] has left its affect. You might be launched from the smaller jail, however you’re nonetheless in a bigger jail and nonetheless utterly haunted by the expertise, and something can deliver you again to that reminiscence. I even had a scene in Taxi the place sooner or later I’m driving and I hear a noise, and I requested my niece, “Did you additionally hear that?” I’m in search of the noise. After which [human-rights lawyer] Nasrin Sotoudeh will get in my automotive, I inform her concerning the sound, and he or she says that each one inmates have this obsession about sound or concerning the voice of their interrogator. So there was a reference already in that film, and right here it’s extra developed.

This film feels very well timed, as a result of this can be a second of heightened censorship all world wide. I’m questioning what your recommendation is for artists on the right way to be courageous. You by no means stopped talking out, even once they threatened you with all kinds of penalties. How does one discover that braveness?

I’m wondering when you have seen actual brave and courageous individuals, as a result of I’m afraid there’s a misunderstanding. I’m not that courageous. I’m simply doing my job. I’m making my movies. There are such a lot of individuals in jail who’ve accomplished unimaginable issues. They’ve gone by means of many starvation strikes. They’ve been preventing and spending a long time in jail. I spent seven months in jail. I went on a starvation strike for 2 days. That’s nothing in comparison with them. I’m simply doing my job; that’s it. I really feel a bit embarrassed when that is seen as braveness. I really feel that it’s not honest to these individuals, or the younger ladies who go into the streets and battle again. They’re taken as a right, however they’re much braver than I’m.