Panahi’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning cinema of courageous resistance sees a man encountering someone he believes was his former prison torturer in this picture of genres that is tonally masterfully juggled, exploring themes of cycles of violence and circles of victimhood in Iran.
Review #3,069
Dir. Jafar Panahi
2025 | Iran, France | Drama, Crime | 103min | 1.85:1 | Persian & Azerbaijani
PG13 (passed clean) for thematic elements, violence, strong language, and smoking
Cast: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi
Plot: An unassuming mechanic is reminded of his time in an Iranian prison when he encounters a man he suspects to be his sadistic jailhouse captor. Panicked, he rounds up a few of his fellow ex-prisoners to confirm the man’s identity.
Awards: Won Palme d’Or (Cannes); Nom. for 2 Oscars – Best International Feature & Best Original Screenplay
International Sales: MK2 (SG: Anticipate Pictures)
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Trauma & Injustice; Political Oppression; Violence & Victimhood
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: Screener
Spoilers: No
This film is a miracle, shot in stealth mode in Iran, with footage that nearly never made it to France, where post-production was completed. To see it win the Cannes Palme d’Or is a testament to Jafar Panahi’s mode of courageous resistance.
Like many of his higher-profile compatriots, including as recently as Mohammad Rasoulof and his The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024), filmmaking that doesn’t toe the line with the politics of the Islamic Republic becomes exceedingly dangerous.
Here in It Was Just an Accident, Panahi mines his experience with imprisonment and conversations with anti-regime inmates, formulating a thematically dense piece on revenge, cycles of violence, morality, and traumatic fears.
A mechanic chances upon a man whom he believes was his former prison torturer, and desperately wants to give him his comeuppance, but isn’t 100% sure about the fellow’s identity.
He enlists someone’s help that grows into an entourage of sorts, or a circle of victimhood and injustice—perhaps one could read it as an ideological variation of Panahi’s same-titled Golden Lion-winning film from 2000.
“There is no need to dig their graves. They’ve done it themselves.”
Different in form from what came before, this is as close as you can get to Panahi doing a genre picture since maybe Crimson Gold (2003), though that is a misnomer because It Was Just an Accident is, instead, a picture of genres—a masterful juggling of tones from revenge thriller (are victims no different from their violent oppressors if they resort to their same tactics?) to black humour (can the pursuit of justice become existentially absurd?) to ‘scar’ drama (I borrow the term from post-Cultural Revolution Chinese cinema that dealt with the psycho-emotional effects of historical trauma).
I say all of these because I find myself often dazzled by Panahi’s chameleon-like ability in adapting to the needs of his projects in a calm, clear-eyed manner while finding the most prudent way to deliver what he wants to say—he’s a restrained filmmaker in every sense of the word, up till the chilling epilogue.
More than a decade ago, Panahi made This Is Not a Film (2011) in his own home when under house arrest, and infamously smuggled it out of Iran in a USB stick hidden in a birthday cake.
It Was Just an Accident shares that same wry irony in its titling, a reflexive disavowal of what he has produced, simply saying: there’s nothing to see here, move on. Touché.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 