This article appeared in the May 23, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025)
The most momentous occasion at this year’s Cannes was neither Tom Cruise’s red-carpet arrival nor Denzel Washington’s surprise honorary Palme d’Or—it was the return of Jafar Panahi to the Croisette after 22 years. The premiere of his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, in the Official Competition also marked the first time in 15 years that the Iranian director was able to attend a public screening of one of his own movies. Following more than two decades characterized by censorship and persecution—including imprisonment, house arrests, and filmmaking and travel bans—Panahi’s reprieve came in February 2023, when he was released from prison after his conviction for “propaganda” was overturned, finally allowing him to live and travel more freely. It also enabled him to return to directing films without the complex and risky levels of subterfuge that all his features since 2011’s This Is Not a Film have involved.
Those movies, including 2015’s Taxi, 2018’s 3 Faces, and 2022’s No Bears, turned meta-reflexively on the practical and ethical questions inherent to filmmaking under a ban. It Was Just an Accident departs from that template with a more straightforward neorealist narrative: the wrenching—but often darkly funny—thriller follows a motley crew of former political prisoners who abduct a man, 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 fear while driving in and around Tehran. Yet even though Panahi doesn’t himself appear in It Was Just an Accident, as he’s done in his other recent films, this is clearly a strikingly personal story about the formidable challenge of continuing life after experiencing the horrors of state repression.
The day after It Was Just an Accident premiered at Cannes, I interviewed Panahi about the film’s making, aided by an interpreter who translated between Farsi and English. Two days later, it was announced that Panahi’s film had won the Palme d’Or.
You have been able to come back to Cannes after a very long time. How are you feeling right now, being here? What was it like being at the premiere?
It’s been 15 years since I was last able to watch a film of mine with an audience. I didn’t even know if this connection would happen between the audience, the film, and myself again. It’s like the first time again. In a way, I had forgotten my previous experiences with an audience. So it was extremely moving, not only for myself—at the end, on the large screen, I saw my actors [in the audience] crying. That was very special.
Your recent films were made under restrictions, and therefore were very self-reflexive. They were about cinema, but also about filmmaking under various constraints. You developed such a strong language of cinema under censorship. What’s it like to return to a freer cinema now, after all those years?
It’s more on a psychological level that it makes a difference, because I was banned from filmmaking for 20 years, which of course made me more introspective and made me think about my own situation. No matter what I thought about, it brought me back to myself. Even if I wanted to make a film about a taxi driver, I saw the taxi driver like myself, a film director who cannot live from his craft and starts driving cars, and listens to people or observes people through his job. I couldn’t run away from my situation.
But as soon as the ban was lifted, I came back to the situation of any director who can work under certain circumstances, and who can travel. But it didn’t make a real difference because what could I have done? Could I go and ask for permission to make this film? Of course they wouldn’t have given me the permission. But at least psychologically, I didn’t feel I was still under the ban; I wasn’t obsessed with myself, or with my old situation. I was able to open up, and to dedicate my work, my film, to the people I had spent time with in prison.
Cars have been a major feature of Iranian cinema—your cinema, the movies of Abbas Kiarostami, and even your son Panah Panahi’s film Hit the Road (2021). I thought it was interesting that this film is also set largely in a moving vehicle.
I don’t know where it comes from. I remember that at some point, Iranian directors made a lot of films about children, and people asked, “Why do you make films about children?” Now it’s about cars. “Why do you make films in cars?” No matter what we change, there will always be questions about why we chose this topic or location. But I think when you’re making underground cinema, being in a car gives you [at least] a minimum level of security. It’s easier to hide from the intelligence agents. But I didn’t make this film about a car or a van; I think only 20 or 30 percent actually takes place inside the vehicle. It’s just the link between different sequences. What else could I choose for their movement? I should have set it in the 19th century and made them use camels or carts! [laughs]
It’s funny you mentioned children, because I did want to ask about that; I’m sorry! Even though this film is not about children, the opening sequence roots it in a child’s morality. A child makes a comment about whether an accident is God’s doing or the character’s, and that idea returns at the end in a more profound way.
It’s maybe a cliché to say this, but it’s about hope for the new generation. In the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, it was the young generation that came and broke all the rules—in such a way that now there is a “before Mahsa Amini” and “after Mahsa Amini” in contemporary Iran.
I read that you were stopped by the police when you were shooting the film, but because the presidential elections were going on, they didn’t interfere much—for fear of bad press. Can you say a little more about the political situation while you were making the film?
In general, you have to work very quickly when you do an underground film, because they can always come and stop you. So we were working very quickly, and it was almost the end of the shoot when they came. They weren’t able to get hold of any of our rushes or our materials, so they had to leave us alone. They threatened many of the members of the cast and crew, and told them that they had to stop working on this project. They didn’t know that it was almost wrapped. They thought that we still had a lot to do.
A lot of films about political prisoners are about the arrest, the torture, what it’s like in prison. To think about what comes after all that feels unimaginable. So to see a film about life after incarceration feels very powerful. Can you talk about that?
Life definitely goes on, but [that experience] has left its impact. You are released from the smaller prison, but you’re still in a larger prison and still completely haunted by the experience, and anything can bring you back to that memory. I even had a scene in Taxi where at some point I’m driving and I hear a noise, and I asked my niece, “Did you also hear that?” I’m looking for the noise. And then [human-rights lawyer] Nasrin Sotoudeh gets in my car, I tell her about the sound, and she says that all inmates have this obsession about sound or about the voice of their interrogator. So there was a reference already in that movie, and here it’s more developed.
This movie feels very timely, because this is a moment of heightened censorship all around the world. I’m wondering what your advice is for artists on how to be brave. You never stopped speaking out, even when they threatened you with all sorts of consequences. How does one find that courage?
I wonder if you have seen real courageous and brave people, because I’m afraid there’s a misunderstanding. I’m not that brave. I’m just doing my job. I’m making my films. There are so many people in prison who have done incredible things. They have gone through many hunger strikes. They have been fighting and spending decades in prison. I spent seven months in prison. I went on a hunger strike for two days. That’s nothing compared to them. I’m just doing my job; that’s it. I feel a bit embarrassed when this is seen as courage. I feel that it’s not fair to those people, or the young women who go into the streets and fight back. They are taken for granted, but they are much braver than I am.
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