FILE – Director Jafar Panahi, winner of the Palme d’Or for the film “It Was Just an Accident,” appears at the awards ceremony photo call at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, on May 24, 2025. (Photo by Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP, File)
Even after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes for It Was Just an Accident, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi remains a man who cannot work in the open. His latest film, a daring, darkly comic meditation on revenge and morality, was shot in secret, smuggled out of Iran, and finished in France. For a director once jailed for “propaganda against the system,” it is both an act of defiance and a mirror of the repression that fuels his art.
Who is Jafar Panahi
Jafar Panahi (born July 11, 1960, in Mianeh, Iran) is among the world’s most acclaimed and resilient filmmakers. Closely associated with the Iranian New Wave, Panahi’s work has long confronted the country’s political constraints and the everyday lives of those caught within them. His debut feature, The White Balloon (1995), won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, launching a career defined by courage and innovation.Over the decades, Jafar Panahi has crafted films that are as socially incisive as they are artistically daring — The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000), Offside (2006), Taxi (2015), No Bears (2022), and now It Was Just an Accident (2025). His latest film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 20 May 2025, where it won the prestigious Palme d’Or. It later opened in French cinemas on 1 October and in the United States on 15 October 2025, also taking home the Sydney Film Prize that same year. Collectively, these works have earned Panahi the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear, and the Palme d’Or — making him the only living filmmaker to have received all three of Europe’s most coveted festival honours. It Was Just an Accident, acclaimed for its tense, morally complex storytelling and fearless political undercurrent, stands as the culmination of a career defined by resistance, integrity, and artistic courage. Yet Panahi’s success has come at enormous personal cost. The Iranian government, accusing him of creating “propaganda against the system,” banned him from filmmaking, international travel, and speaking to journalists for 20 years. He was arrested multiple times, including a seven-month imprisonment in 2022, and spent years under house arrest. Even so, he continued to make films covertly, turning resistance into a creative method. “I don’t know how to do anything at all apart from making films,” he once said.
What It Was Just an Accident Is about, and where it came from
Panahi’s new film, It Was Just an Accident, is both a story of vengeance and a study of conscience — a work that channels his own experience of imprisonment and moral reckoning. The film follows a group of former political prisoners who kidnap a man they believe was their torturer. Blindfolded during their interrogations years earlier, they can only recognise him by the squeak of his artificial leg. As they drive through the desert in a van, the group argues over whether they have the right man and, if so, what justice really looks like. Panahi drew the film’s inspiration directly from his time in Evin Prison, Iran’s most notorious detention facility.Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s latest work, It Was Just an Accident, is both a story of vengeance and a moral inquiry, a film born directly from his own time behind barsIn 2010, Panahi was held in near-total isolation, a cell barely large enough to lie down in, blindfolded even on his way to the toilet. His interrogations would last for hours, his face pressed toward a wall while his unseen questioner spoke from behind him.He later reflected: “Because you keep hearing this voice. You always ask yourself, ‘If I ever hear this voice outside prison, am I going to recognise it?’”His second imprisonment in 2022 was different but no less formative. This time, he was part of a prison population of around 300 people, including 30 or 40 political prisoners. Many had spent half their lives behind bars. Panahi passed time listening to their stories, some violent, others deeply humane, and formed close friendships.After his release, he often found himself returning to the prison gates, staring up at the walls that confined his friends. The stories he’d heard there, of courage, rage, and endurance, became the seeds of It Was Just an Accident.
How ‘It Was Just an Accident’ was made
Even after the Iranian government lifted his filmmaking ban in 2023, Jafar Panahi chose secrecy once again. To film openly in Iran would have meant submitting his script for government approval, a compromise he flatly refused. “We will not play the game,” he said. Producing It Was Just an Accident became an extraordinary act of creative evasion. The entire film was shot with a skeleton team of non-professionals, using just two cars as mobile sets. No one on set had the full script; instead, Panahi sent out the next day’s lines and locations by phone each night. Every detail — from casting to camera movement — was planned to minimise exposure and avoid state interference. Panahi financed the project himself, piecing together limited funds to keep production independent and to ensure no trail could lead the authorities back to him. Over 25 intense days of filming, the crew worked swiftly and in silence, often in the open desert or inside a van where most of the film’s story takes place. The precautions were almost cinematic in themselves. Actors carried fake scripts in case they were stopped, while the crew travelled with dummy cameras and empty memory cards as decoys. Near the end of shooting, plainclothes officers raided the set — but Panahi had already hidden multiple copies of the footage in separate locations. The authorities left empty-handed. Production paused for nearly a month after the raid, before Panahi quietly resumed with a smaller team. Once complete, the footage was smuggled out of Iran and delivered to France, where Panahi worked with producer Philippe Martin (Anatomy of a Fall) to complete post-production. The finished film bears the marks of its clandestine birth: shot in tight spaces, charged with tension, and layered with glimpses of everyday Iranian absurdities — bribe-taking guards, traffic gridlock, and bureaucratic red tape. The secrecy behind its making becomes part of its heartbeat, infusing every scene with the same defiance that brought it to life.
The films that shaped his journey
Jafar Panahi’s defiance did not begin with It Was Just an Accident. Over three decades, he has transformed censorship and confinement into art, finding new ways to film when the state forbade him from holding a camera, directing actors, or even leaving his home. His debut, The White Balloon (1995), a simple story about a young girl trying to buy a goldfish for New Year, won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and marked him as a new voice of Iranian realism. The Mirror (1997) blurred fiction and reality when its young star suddenly broke character, announcing she no longer wished to act, a moment Panahi kept rolling through, turning rebellion itself into cinema. By The Circle (2000), Panahi’s work had become unmistakably political. The film’s interlocking stories of women navigating Iran’s restrictions won the Venice Golden Lion but was banned at home for its portrayal of female oppression. Crimson Gold (2003) followed a poor pizza delivery man’s descent into desperation, exposing class inequality with devastating calm. His 2006 film Offside tackled gender segregation with humour and empathy, focusing on girls disguised as boys trying to watch a World Cup qualifier — another banned triumph, this time earning the Berlin Silver Bear.Then came the years of house arrest and imprisonment, during which Panahi refused to fall silent. This Is Not a Film (2011), a self-portrait of his maddening legal battle, was shot entirely inside his Tehran apartment while he awaited appeal. Smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive hidden inside a cake, it reached the Cannes Film Festival that same year, a quiet act of rebellion disguised as a home video.For Taxi (2015), a lively and humane portrait of life in Tehran, Panahi transformed himself into a cab driver, filming conversations with passengers from all walks of life. The result — part road movie, part social mirror, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and was celebrated for its wit and courage under restriction.When No Bears premiered at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival, Panahi was again imprisoned in Evin. The film follows a filmmaker named Jafar Panahi who travels to a remote village near the Turkish border to direct a movie on the other side via video chat. Through these works, Panahi forged a cinema of defiance, part documentary, part fiction, always profoundly human. Each film turned limits into language, making restriction itself a storytelling tool. With It Was Just an Accident, he pushes that evolution further, transforming his years behind bars into a meditation on conscience and revenge, and proving, once again, that in his hands, even captivity can become creation.
The Oscar dilemma
For all its acclaim, It Was Just an Accident faces a paradoxical barrier: it cannot represent Iran at the Oscars. According to the Academy’s rules, a submission for Best International Feature must be made by the producing country, and Iran’s government refuses to nominate Panahi’s work. A group of Iranian filmmakers had petitioned the government to let them choose independently, but, as Panahi predicted, “it is very unlikely for it to happen.” In a creative workaround, France, which co-financed post-production, has submitted the film instead. The decision has drawn controversy, with several French-language films overlooked, but it ensures Panahi’s work remains visible. An Oscar nomination would carry symbolic weight. For a dissident filmmaker, it represents more than prestige, it is a form of international protection and a rebuke to censorship. “This,” Panahi has said, “is a form of resistance.”
A filmmaker who refuses to leave
Unlike many Iranian artists who have chosen exile, Jafar Panahi insists on staying. “I will always return home. I cannot be separate from Iran,” he told an audience in Los Angeles. “They have the ability to adapt themselves to another culture. I don’t.” His determination to remain in Iran is bound to his belief that cinema must witness reality, not escape it. According to The Washington Post, when he addressed audiences in Toronto, he said: “Perhaps if they had not put me in prison, this film would never have been made. So I was not the person who made this film. It was the Islamic Republic who made this film, and I’d like to congratulate them.” The remark drew loud applause from the crowd, many rising to their feet in recognition of both his courage and irony. His films, made under threat and constraint, continue to reveal the contradictions of a nation where art itself is an act of dissent. If It Was Just an Accident proves anything, it is that even surveillance and censorship cannot silence him, they only sharpen his vision. In his words, the state may have built the prison, but it also built the story. Go to Source
