In the second week of the 2025 New York Film Festival, President Donald Trump announced that he would impose a 100 percent tariff on foreign films imported to the United States. As to why this news didn’t cause any comment, much less an outcry or protest, at the festival, it may have had to do something to do with the fact that Trump announced the same thing back in May and didn’t follow through. But there were surely grounds for concern for the simple reason that the New York Film Festival has long been the primary launching pad for foreign films entering the U.S.
For the last three decades, foreign films have represented an ever-decreasing share of box office returns in this country. But when the NYFF was founded in the early ‘60s—the era of Bergman, Fellini and the French New Wave—they were of supreme importance from an aesthetic standpoint, essentially forging the definition of film as art. Their impact on what might be called the Scorsese Generation of filmmakers, attending the festival as high school or college students, can scarcely be overestimated.
This year, 23 of the 34 films in the festival’s Main Slate were of foreign origin. As has been the case for decades, the most prominent among them emerged from the Cannes Film Festival, still the world’s preeminent launching platform for the world ‘s art cinema. Increasingly in recent years, the NYFF has served as a way station between Cannes and the Best International Film Oscar.
In 2025, three Cannes laureates at the NYFF seem the leading contenders for that Oscar. “It Was Just an Accident,” by Iranian master Jafar Panahi, won Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or. Though an Iranian film in setting and themes, it has been submitted to the Oscars by France, something that has upset some filmmakers in both Iran and France. (It wasn’t eligible in Iran because it violated regulations for not being submitted to government censors before filming and for showing women without hijab; it also had French producers.) “Sentimental Value” by Norway’s Joachim Trier won Cannes’ second prize, the Grand Prix, and strikes me as having the greatest commercial potential in the U.S. And the Brazilian entry, “The Secret Agent,” won Cannes’ Best Director prize for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, a popular choice. (All three of these films are distributed in the U.S. by Neon, which also handles two other potential Oscar contenders, South Korea’s “No Other Choice” and France/Spain’s “Sirat.”)
Although the NYFF has been incredibly valuable in introducing foreign films to American audiences, in recent years it has maintained the very unfortunate policy of not having press conferences for films that arguably most need them. My first year covering the festival, in 1980, I found great value in the press conferences for Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and other great directors. The NYFF has always been an auteur-oriented festival, but some years back it began keeping foreign auteurs from the press. (Most directors do appear at their films’ public screenings and have brief Q&As afterwards.)
At this year’s festival, not one director of the festival’s 23 foreign films—including those named above—was given a press conference. Instead, press conferences were held for English-language films containing movie stars—Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Daniel Day-Lewis, Bradley Cooper, et al. Why? One can only assume that these events were aimed at the entertainment press and meant to provide publicity for the festival.
What’s obviously missing in this approach is lots of cultural and political context that foreign directors could supply if they were allowed to speak to the press. Foreign films at the festival almost always leave me with questions that a press conference would give me and others the chance to ask. As a colleague noted, it would be so much more efficient for everyone if critics could question filmmakers as a group, rather than having to chase them down individually. And surely most non-American directors would welcome the chance to engage with critics and explain their work as a way of reaching the American public. (I should add that U.S. directors whose films don’t have movie stars may well feel the same.)
In the case of Jafar Panahi, the relevant context has to do not only with the circumstances of making films in Iran but also with his own career, which has been unusual. He is the only Iranian director to have an international audience before having an Iranian one. His first film, “The White Balloon,” written by his mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, went to Cannes in 1995 and won the Camera d’Or for Best First Film, launching it on a successful career in art houses worldwide (it was the first Iranian film to get a real art-house launch in the U.S.). His third film, “The Circle,” was his first to have a strong political theme and it was banned by the Iranian regime, as were some of his subsequent films, but in a sense, that hardly mattered since all of his output was welcomed by foreign festivals and distributors.
Panahi’s fortunes took a drastic turn in 2010. After being arrested for his political activities, he was sentenced to six years in prison and 20 years not making films, writing screenplays, giving interviews or leaving Iran. The enforcement of these restrictions, though, has been variable. Rather than serving his prison sentence, he was put under house arrest and gradually allowed to roam around Tehran and Iran. And he kept making films without government permission, filming them on the fly, editing them at home and then sending them surreptitiously to international festivals. These daring, nonofficial productions only added to his global renown.
“It Was Only an Accident” is the fifth such film he’s made. Since its completion, the Iranian regime has somewhat relaxed its restrictions on him, for example in allowing him to travel abroad. (He has noted that when the film premiered at Cannes was the first time in 17 years that he has seen one of his films with an audience.) This film differs from the previous four in a couple of noteworthy respects. In those films, he was onscreen as a character—sometimes the main character—in the story. The earlier films also foregrounded cinema itself, showing its processes, pondering its meaning.
Dispensing with these trademark aspects of Panahi’s recent cinema, “It Was Just an Accident” tells a straightforward tale of revenge. It begins on a dark highway at night, in a car with a couple (the woman is pregnant) and their young daughter. The little girl becomes upset when her father accidentally runs over a dog. (Mom says it was God’s will; the daughter doesn’t buy it.) Further on, there’s car trouble and the father pulls into a warehouse for help. While he’s waiting, a man working upstairs, Vahid (Vahid Mobaserri), hears him walking around and thinks he detects the sound of a prosthetic leg.
That faint but distinctive noise convinces Vahid that the father is a man named Eqbal, nickname Peg Leg (Ebrahim Azizi), who tortured him when Vahid was imprisoned years before. Enraged to encounter a person he considers a monster, Vahid tracks him to a car repair shop the next day, hits him over the head with a shovel, ties him up and then takes him into the desert where digs the man’s grave.
Even while he’s lying in the grave with Vahid shoveling dirt on him, Eqbal isn’t dead and he begins trying to convince his captor that he’s got the wrong man. Look at my leg, see that the wound is recent, he shouts. Vahid pulls the prosthesis off and it does look like the scar underneath is fairly fresh. He’s still convinced he’s got the right guy, but now an element of doubt has been introduced.
With Eqbal removed from the grave and returned to the back of his truck, Vahid goes into Tehran looking for corroboration. The first person he finds, an older man, counsels him to give up his crusade and live in the present; but he tells Vahid how to contact another former prisoner, a female photographer named Shiva (Maryam Afshari, who appears without hibab). Shiva is taking photos of a couple who are to be married the next day, and it turns out that the woman was also tortured by Peg Leg. With the addition of the bride, groom and another former victim, Vahid has a truck-load of aggrieved passengers. But while there’s lots of passion and vindictive rage in their discussions, there’s no consensus on what to do with their presumed Peg Leg.
“It Was Just an Accident” takes place over roughly 24 hours, and its telling—recalling a classic of Iran’s pre-revolutionary cinema, Farrokh Ghaffary’s “Night of the Hunchback”—is full of Panahi’s characteristic assurance and inventiveness, especially in its mix of tense drama and unexpected humor. Yet I was also struck by things Panahi doesn’t include. Perhaps most importantly, there are no flashbacks; the film remains in present tense throughout. Thus, while we hear the characters describe the tortures they were put though, we don’t see them; they exist only as memories.
Similarly, we know that these torture victims were imprisoned for various offenses, but those are mostly left vague. Vahid says he was arrested for protesting not being paid for several months, a common complaint in Iran’s besieged economy. But we hear nothing of the political activism—like Panahi’s own—that has gotten others imprisoned and subjected to the most dire punishments. (Other Iranian films such as Mohammad Rasoulof’s “There Is No Evil” give a more detailed picture of prison in Iran.) Likewise, an accused torturer like Eqbal has no rationales for his actions except wanting to defend “the regime” and the “Supreme Leader” (that mention alone was enough to get the film banned in Iran, Panahi has said).
What explains these creative decisions on Panahi’s part? I’ve not seen other writers comment on what they think the film means, beyond its excellence as cinema, but my reading is that it is Panahi’s first attempt to envision an Iran no longer ruled by the current theocratic regime. If that government were to somehow fall (as many Iranians surely wish), what would come next? Inevitably, the tortured would confront their torturers. Would that result in a bloodbath similar to the one that occurred after the last Shah’s government was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution of 1979?
Panahi is a filmmaker of extraordinary subtlety, and here I think he is suggesting that, while the passions for revenge in many cases would be justified, they should be controlled and channeled, as much as possible, toward reconciliation. And though his films are always specific to Iran (he has no desire to live or work elsewhere, he has indicated), they also have universal resonances. “It Was Just an Accident” is no exception: It arrives when many countries in the West are bitterly divided politically, with authoritarian tendencies vying against democratic ones, posing the question of how the two sides might ever come together. Panahi’s artistry gives us clues.
A final note: Jafar Panahi was scheduled to appear at the NYFF public screenings of his film on Oct. 2 and 3 and to take part in a discussion of his work with Martin Scorsese, also on Oct. 3. However, he did not get a visa to appear for these events due to the current U.S. government shutdown. Fortunately, a visa was forthcoming a few days later and he appeared for public screenings on Oct. 8. His discussion with Scorsese was rescheduled for Oct. 10. He will remain in the U.S. through the opening of “It Was Not an Accident” on Oct. 15.
Alas, no press conference was scheduled at any point.
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