Such humility is becoming in any filmmaker, especially one clutching a Palme d’Or. The citation, bestowed at Cannes upon Panahi’s new film, It Was Just an Accident, gave the 65-year-old director a lifetime sweep of the world’s top film festival prizes, along with a Golden Bear from Berlin and a Lion from Venice. Panahi’s modesty serves as an extension of the humane sensibility that suffuses his films—an empathy that transcends simple technique. It also belies the obvious and lamentable fact that Panahi has had a very hard time doing his job for some while now.
Rather than submit to the dictates of Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance—where the buck stops for filmmakers in search of official support or theatrical distribution—Panahi has continually striven for creative freedom, whether via procedural ruses like submitting fake scripts for committee approval or else by ignoring the authorities’ input entirely. The extravagant praise bestowed on his films by international critics has, predictably, served to exacerbate his perceived enemy-of-the-state status at home; in 2010, following a series of increasingly public skirmishes with the authorities, Panahi was detained and imprisoned by the Iranian government on charges of disseminating propaganda against the regime. He was sentenced to six years in prison (a stretch eventually reduced to house arrest) and also a 20-year ban on travel, foreign media interviews, and filmmaking of any kind. The latter, it seemed, was a cruel and unusual punishment: an edict designed both to staunch a fearless artist’s output, and also to break his spirit.
“Nothing can prevent me from making films since when being pushed to the ultimate corners I connect with my inner self,” said Panahi in 2015. “Despite all limitations, the necessity to create becomes even more of an urge.”
That urgency can be felt throughout It Was Just an Accident, which is the first movie that Panahi has made on the other side of his filmmaking ban, as well as his first since being released from a seven-month stint in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in 2023. (He was jailed for inquiring about the status of a fellow anti-establishment director, Mohammad Rasoulof.) Technically, It Was Just an Accident is the work of a free man, but it feels more obsessive than liberated, as it plunges deeply into the minutiae and metaphysics of imprisonment. In formal terms, it might be Panahi’s most conventional piece of work since the 1990s, but accessibility shouldn’t be mistaken for compromise. It’s a bristling, brilliant piece of work: a swift and rollicking comic thriller whose autobiographical subtext lies under the surface, like an engine beneath a chassis, or a body stowed in the trunk.
Like his wife—who, it turns out, is pregnant with their second child— Eghbal may be a true believer, but he isn’t given any opportunities of his own to opine about divine intervention. Rather, he’s swiftly reduced to a prop: drugged, battered dead weight, trussed-up and locked away in the back of a van driven by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), the film’s true protagonist. Vahid was working the late shift at a roadside warehouse when Eghbal brought in his wrecked car for repairs; watching from the shadows, Vahid recognized the interloper’s voice—and the squeaking of his prosthetic leg—as belonging to the notorious torturer at Evin known colloquially as “Peg Leg.” Vahid is a quiet man with no desire to revisit his past, but one accident begets another. What will be will be. The question: Did God put Peg Leg in Vahid’s path for a reason? Or does God have nothing to do with it?
It is a thin line between parable-like simplicity and outright contrivance, and It Was Just an Accident circumnavigates its chosen route smartly; the slight bumpiness of the dramaturgy works in a story where the man at the wheel isn’t always sure where he’s headed. Panahi has written the script to have a sense of the absurd; at one point, a character name-checks Beckett, and there are various satirical threads woven through the storyline. Vahid pays off a pair of skeptical security guards via a portable card reader—a bit of business that gets repeated later on at a hospital. At least the bribery is convenient: no cash required. Throughout, Panahi cultivates a strain of mordant comedy around the problems of transporting a body through a busy city (this is surely the first Palme winner to evoke Weekend at Bernie’s). There’s also humor in the group’s sputtering, fractious interactions, but it’s rooted in authentic trauma. “He made me feel his rotten leg with a blindfold on, to prove his exploits in their fucking holy war,” moans Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), the construction worker, after examining the unconscious Eghbal’s body. “I’ve been running my hand over his leg for five years, in my nightmares.”
There’s an element of gauntlet-dropping to Shiva’s character: Afshari is the first woman to appear in one of Panahi’s films without a mandatory hijab, and her vibe—thoughtful and cosmopolitan beneath a fashionable shank of silvering hair—makes her a complex avatar of social change, especially in a movie that maps the collateral damage of principled resistance. (In a nicely calibrated irony, Vahid’s van resembles those of the so-called morality police, whose remit is to enforce religious dress codes.) It’s Shiva who tries the hardest to pump the brakes on Vahid’s plan, and yet she also ends up delivering the film’s most harrowing speech, an outburst of pure fury that gives the impression of Panahi—who has necessarily had to play himself on-screen, for the last 15 years or so—addressing his captors through a distaff surrogate.
This penultimate sequence—lit expressionistically by deep-crimson brake lights and captured in a single, static, unblinking take—represents some of the most remarkable staging and direction of Panahi’s career; it sears through the screen, and lifts the veil, already thin and fluttering, on the film’s fiction. The coda, meanwhile, suggests a different kind of exposure, a gaping psychic wound that neither time nor distance will ever quite suture shut. The final moments find a key character paralyzed with fear and doubt, rooted to the spot as his past creeps up on him, one creaky footstep at a time. We’ll never know if he’s able to move on; the bravery of Panahi’s film lies in its maker’s own refusal to be overtaken. The movie is evidence of his mobility. He pushes forward, with his camera in hand: another job well done.
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