Brought to international prominence with his debut, The White Balloon, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1995, Jafar Panahi has since become a central figure in world cinema and a beacon of creative defiance.
His arrest in 2010 and the subsequent 20-year ban on filmmaking, travel, and interviews — punishment for his outspoken political views — did not silence him entirely.
Panahi continued making films in secret, often under house arrest and with minimal resources.
Works like This Is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), and No Bears (2022) turned his repression into a tool of cinematic resistance, earning acclaim at international festivals – even when he was unable to attend them himself.
With It Was Just an Accident, his 11th fiction feature, Panahi returns to Cannes in person for the first time in over a decade and, expectedly, this time he received the festival’s highest honour, the Palme d’Or.
In a defiant and emotional acceptance speech, he dedicated the award to the people of Iran, declaring: “What’s most important now is our country and the freedom of our country,” and calling on Iranians to “join forces.”
He added: “No one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do, or what we should not do.”
The film itself reflects Panahi’s resistance, both thematically and in its method of production. Quiet in tone but politically charged, it was shot without a permit and features women not wearing the legally mandated hijab.
Produced by Panahi in collaboration with Philippe Martin of Les Films Pelléas — also behind the Palm d’Or winner from two years ago, Anatomy of a Fall — and co-produced by Bidibul Productions (Luxembourg) and Pio & Co (France), the project was completed in post-production in France.
Life prevails over death
It Was Just an Accident opens with a deceptively simple incident: a man named Eghbal is driving late at night with his pregnant wife when they accidentally hit a dog. The car breaks down shortly after, forcing him to seek help at a nearby garage.
There, he encounters Vahid, the garage owner, who becomes convinced that Eghbal is the same officer who once tortured him in prison – an unmistakably recognisable man with a false leg who left both psychological and physical scars.
As the tension mounts, Vahid takes Eghbal captive and reaches out to others who also suffered at the hands of the same torturer: a former cellmate, a bookseller, a wedding photographer named Shiva, and a newlywed couple all pile into Vahid’s van, each carrying their own burden of trauma.
What begins as a quest for revenge gradually transforms into a haunting moral inquiry: Is this man truly who they believe he is? And if so, does vengeance offer any real resolution?
Just as they teeter on the brink of becoming monsters themselves, life interrupts — the captive’s wife goes into labour, and suddenly, the instinct for humanity is awakened. The humiliated rush to save the child of their tormentor; the victims are given the chance to become heroes; life prevails over death.
Longing for human connection
As with many of Panahi’s works, this one is once again marked by minimalism and subtle nuances — an emblematic style, partly imposed by the near-impossible conditions in which all Iranian directors who question the current regime are forced to work.
Such a feature, however, fosters the creation of internal dynamics: just when the first half of the film risks feeling dramaturgically flat to the point of boredom, a sudden shift in the plot shakes the senses and the brain without ever substantially changing the setting type.
With imagination nurtured by lived experience, a touch of absurdist humour, and a longing for restored human connection, Panahi turns a dusty road thriller into a life-affirming journey, where friends and enemies swap places, the notion of timely action blurs, and politics lose their weight in the face of existential urgency.
And by the end, nothing is as it seemed at the beginning, which is precisely the film’s strength: its ability to question its own initially established position and to attempt to rise above the topical, even when rooted in personally lived suffering.
A magnanimous confession from Panahi, in which one reads steadfastness and persistence in exposing the regime, but also a readiness for human reconciliation with those used as pawns by the dictatorship, in the name of a more humane future.
Much debate could be had over whether, compared to the other contenders on artistic terms, Jafar Panahi truly deserved the Palme d'Or or whether it was awarded to him for purely political reasons, as is often the case, and the conclusions would likely not be in his favour.
Many questions remain unanswered as well, such as why it was precisely with this film that he was able to leave the country and present it in Cannes, and why, unlike Mohammad Rasoulof who last year won the Special Jury Prize, Panahi is not afraid to return to Iran, despite receiving ovations at the Croisette and making open anti-government statements.
Whatever the answers may be — answers the public is unlikely to learn anytime soon, if ever — the return of Iranian cinema in the spirit of Panahi’s work in Cannes is undeniably good news: a cinema that is both contemplative and hyperreal, bleak yet laced with irony, rich in contradictions and open to ambiguous interpretations.
Hopefully, the Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident signals a shift away from the more formulaic, Netflix-shaped aesthetic of filmmakers like Rasoulof, who don’t challenge the West’s narrow view of Iran, but rather conform to it.
Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films