Palme d'Or Winner Jafar Panahi on How He Made the Risky 'It Was Just an Accident' in Iran — and Why Americans Should Heed Its Warning Peter DebrugeOctober 18, 2025 at 10:06 PM 0 Getty Images "What else is left for them to do that they haven't done yet?" asks resilient Iranian director Jafar Panahi, ...
- - Palme d'Or Winner Jafar Panahi on How He Made the Risky 'It Was Just an Accident' in Iran — and Why Americans Should Heed Its Warning
Peter DebrugeOctober 18, 2025 at 10:06 PM
0
Getty Images
"What else is left for them to do that they haven't done yet?" asks resilient Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced to six years in prison for "propaganda against the system" after planning a film about protests against the 2009 election. "Are they going to ban me from leaving again? Okay, let them ban me. That way, I have more time, and instead of traveling, I can write my next film. They want to throw me in jail? Okay, let them throw me in jail. Then I will find the topic of my next film."
Astonishing as it may seem, I have seen Panahi three times outside Iran in the last six months, first in Cannes, where he won the Palme d'Or — the top prize at the world's most important film festival — for "It Was Just an Accident."
More from Variety
New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
'Samsara,' 'It Was Just an Accident,' 'Magellan' Lead Asia Pacific Screen Awards Nominations
Government Shutdown Forces 'It Was Just an Accident' Director Jafar Panahi to Skip New York Film Festival Premiere Over Visa Delay
Next, I spotted him on the streets of Telluride. He'd traveled all the way to an old mining town high in the mountains of Colorado to receive the prestigious festival's Silver Medallion. Though nothing is more important to Panahi than cinema, I doubt he can go two hours without a tobacco fix, and there he was, smoking a cigarette in front of the New Sheridan Hotel.
Just this past weekend, I was invited to moderate a Q&A with Panahi at the Ojai Playhouse, two hours north of Los Angeles — a unique opportunity to interview a personal hero, who speaks through a translator. The way things are going, I expect we'll next cross paths at the Academy Awards.
In any case, it's surreal to encounter Panahi outside of Iran, since the defiant diretor of "This Is Not a Film" and "No Bears" has been under a 20-year ban from leaving the country — or, more to the point, from making movies — since 2010, when he was charged with "propaganda against the system" and sentenced to six years in prison for planning a film about protests against the 2009 election.
Panahi has served about 10 months of that term: the first three while awaiting trail in 2010, and seven more, starting in July 2022, when he presented himself at Tehran's Evin Prison to question the arrest of a fellow director, Mohammad Rasoulof (whose "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" suggests just how untenable Iran's repressive regime truly is). Panahi was detained and locked up shortly before the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, which sparked the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
After going on hunger strike in February 2023, Panahi was eventually allowed to return home, and though the authorities have strictly forbidden him from filmmaking, he did more than simply defy them. "It Was Just an Accident" is a direct response to time served.
"If I hadn't gone to prison, I would not have understood these characters, and perhaps this film would never have been done," Panahi told me. "So I'm not the one who made this film. This film was made by the people who put me in prison."
In the movie, a man haunted by his time in Evin is convinced that he has found his cruel interrogator, Eqbal, in the outside world. Though he never saw his tormentor's face in person, the survivor recognizes the sound of Eqbal's false leg. It's like "Death and the Maiden," played for absurdist comedy, as he kidnaps the one-legged stranger, then enlists three fellow survivors to confirm the inspector's identity and decide what to do.
When I complimented Panahi on his courage in telling a story so openly critical of his experience, he rejected that word. "To me, it's really not 'courage.' This is the work I do. My work is cinema. In order to do my work and protect the beliefs that I have about cinema, nothing is important to me. We have accepted that where we live, anything you do comes with a price," Panahi said.
"You call me brave, but the truth is that many people are doing things that are way more important," he continued in full sincerity. "I'll give you a small example. I met people in prison who would go on hunger strikes for 20 or 30 days, and no one would find out about it, whereas if I stopped eating for two days, the entire world would find out. So, compared to them, my actions are not really being brave."
"It Was Just an Accident" is Panahi's tribute to those people whose lived experience is reflected in the collection of characters who determine Eqbal's fate in the film. For seven months, Panahi had been getting to know his fellow prisoners, talking and listening to their stories.
"We were sharing these stories not because I had it in mind to make a film about them. It was just a matter of passing the time, to make the prison days easier. They needed to share their stories, and I needed to hear them," Panahi said.
"The moment I stepped out of prison, I turned around and I looked at those tall walls, and it hit me that my friends were left behind. And as days go by, it just eats you from the inside," he explained. "So I said to myself one day, 'I have to do something. What could I do? I don't know anything other than cinema.' And then it hits me that this is the language I can speak in — the language of cinema — and that became a motivation for work."
In the film, Panahi was intentionally sparing with how much he shares about the characters' backstories. We see that Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who thinks he recognizes Eqbal (Ebrahim Azizi), is a simple worker. "Only because he had objected to the situation, they had thrown him in jail," Panahi told me, though the detail had escaped me in the script. It's clear that Shiva (Mariam Afshari), the pacifist wedding photographer, and the hot-headed Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr) were in a relationship that did not last.
"We know that Shiva was a journalist who wrote a piece about bogus drugs, fake medicine, and because of what she exposed, she went to prison," Panahi said. "Eqbal, the interrogator, was humiliated in his childhood, and those acts of humiliation have affected him in a way that he has now come to power and is trying to prove himself."
The details may be minimal, but according to Panahi, "I thought this much would be enough for us to be able to follow bigger conversations about the topic of anger, the topic of justice, the topic of forgiveness and, more important than anything, the topic of the cycle of violence and whether it's going to continue in the future."
That matters, Panahi believes, because such a system cannot continue indefinitely. The film illustrates as much: Sooner or later, the people will turn on their oppressors, at which point, the debate about what to do with Eqbal anticipates questions of how to handle those who were complicit in the old means of control.
"This film is made for the post-Islamic Republic. So I am raising a question in the film: Have we prepared ourselves to do what we need to do for the day after the collapse of the regime?" Panahi said. "I do believe that the collapse is going to happen, but no one knows when — today, tomorrow, in a week, in a month, in a year. No one knows."
After the screening, Panahi admitted that his career had started in a very different vein, far removed from the kind of social consciousness the world first witnessed with "The White Balloon" in 1995 — ethical, ground-level stories about people Panahi lives with or observes on the streets. Before that, as a student, he'd been inspired by one of Hollywood's greatest directors.
"I learned the alphabet of cinema from Alfred Hitchcock. And it helped me later on, so that I wouldn't have spelling mistakes in my films," said Panahi, who was enterprising enough to secure a budget from the national TV to make a short film in the style of Hitchcock. "When I got to the editing process, I asked myself, 'What nonsense have you made?' The alphabet was correct, but the film had no soul."
In his shame, Panahi went to the lab, stole the negatives and destroyed them. Afterward, he felt despondent for a time, unsure what kind of contribution he might make to cinema. And then he discovered Italian neorealism — "and especially 'Bicycle Thieves'" by Vittorio De Sica, he beamed. "I realized that I love socially engaged cinema, but I'm wasting my time in another genre."
Over the course of his first few features, Panahi was content fighting for civil rights, pushing back on the oppression of women with films such as "The Circle" and "Offside," or else exposing the cost of class differences in "Crimson Gold."
When Panahi first received his heavy sentence in 2010, he was reminded of how so many of his students had complained that they found it impossible to work within the Iranian system. Instead of adopting that same defeatist attitude, he thought: "Okay, the authorities have told me not to make a film, so I'm going to shoot something in my own apartment with a friend, and then at the end call it, 'This Is Not a Film.'"
If he could not make films for a living, Panahi had to come up with another form of income. "The easiest thing for me would be to drive a taxi," he thought. But even then, Panahi realized, "If I drive a taxi around, I'm still going to place a camera somewhere and tell the stories of my passengers." That film, "Taxi," won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival.
He's grown even more creative since. "When I was working with Mohammad Rasoulof in my apartment, we still did not have much experience, and that's why they raided my place and took us to prison. We had not taken security measures," said Panahi, who gradually realized what they needed to do: Now, he keeps his team small and avoids using large equipment, to minimize the attention drawn to his productions. At times, he and Rasoulof direct by proxy, while the crew pretends to be shooting a student film or commercial.
Casting is clearly a challenge for Panahi's movies, which are shot without permits in direct violation of the law (bypassing the obligation to submit his scripts to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for approval). He asks potential actors to read the script at his place, then gives them 24 hours to decide if they want to be involved. In theory, their participation could result in punishment — the reason many Iranian films list "Anonymous" where names normally appear in the credits.
"I really believe that everyone can act. What matters is that they are chosen correctly," Panahi said. "The first thing I pay attention to is physical appearance, the body of a potential actor. When the physical characteristics are a match, as soon as you see that person on the screen, you're halfway there."
Panahi writes the roles first, then looks for the right person to embody them. In "It Was Just an Accident," the movie opens with Eqbal, which catches audiences off-guard, since they start to sympathize with him — a family man, driving with his young daughter and pregnant wife, who's upset when a dog runs in front of his car— before meeting Vahid or hearing why he might have reason to hate Eqbal.
"As you go through the film and you see the other characters in doubt about who this person is, you as the audience are also in doubt because you remember how distressed he was by having killed a dog," Panahi explained. Prior to 2022, the filmmaker wouldn't have dared target such a character — to make Eqbal a metonym for the regime.
"When I was in prison, something happened which divided the history of the Islamic Republic into before and after: Women, Life, Freedom," Panahi said. "Everything changed after that, and cinema could not be separate from it, especially this kind of cinema that claims to be socially engaged. Ordinary people had started to break the red lines. And now cinema also had to go past the red lines."
Looking back, Panahi recalled a startling experience from the year 2000, when he gave his script for "The Circle" to someone he wanted to work on the film: "When I went to speak to them two days later, they put the script in an envelope and gave it back to me very hastily. They told me, 'Take this and don't ever show it to anyone. … You might get stabbed on the street, and your intestines will fall out,'" he said. "Back then, 'The Circle' was one step ahead of the society. But since Women, Life, Freedom, cinema was falling behind. The society is now one step ahead of cinema, and we try to catch up."
That explains something as simple as showing women without the traditional head covering. Before, it was a violation to film actresses without the hijab. But since those 2022 protests, many women have rejected the hijab. "Social cinema is not supposed to lie. If it does not depict these realities, does not stay truthful to this principle, the film will not be believable."
This evolution in Iranian cinema, represented by Panahi's latest and Rasoulof's "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" before it, marks a shift for international audiences as well. Previously, it was easy to watch Panahi's film with pity for those in what appeared to be a more restrictive theocratic culture.
Panahi sees it the other way around, and has warned as much when he travels to other countries. "Unfortunately," he said, "what we are living in contemporary Iran — what seems like the past — is the future of many places in which we see these signs."
Best of Variety
New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
Oscar Predictions: A Top-Heavy Awards Season With Too Many Favorites and Not Enough Space in the Race
The Best Pop Culture Halloween Costumes for 2025: From 'One Battle After Another' to 'Life of a Showgirl'
Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: VoXi MAG
Full Article on Source: VoXi MAG
#LALifestyle #USCelebrities