From prison cell to Cannes

Iran’s director Jafar Panahi defies censorship, creates art

Jafar Panahi never set out to be a political filmmaker. “In my definition, a political filmmaker defends an ideology where the good follow it and the bad oppose it,” the Iranian director says. “In my films, even those who behave badly are shaped by the system, not personal choice,” he tells DW.

But for more than a decade, Panahi has had little choice. Following his support for the opposition Green Movement protests, the director of The White Balloon and The Circle, was handed a 20-year ban on filmmaking and international travel in 2010. That didn’t stop him.

Over the years, he found new ways to shoot, edit, and smuggle out his films — from turning his living room into a film set (This Is Not a Film) to using a car as a mobile studio (in Taxi, which won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlinale).

Last week, Panahi stepped back into the spotlight — not through smuggled footage or video calls, but in person. For the first time in over two decades, the now 64-year-old filmmaker returned to the Cannes Film Festival to present his latest feature, It Was Just an Accident, premiering in competition to an emotional 8-minute standing ovation.

Prison to the Palais

The road to Cannes has been anything but smooth. Panahi was arrested again in July 2022 and detained in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. After almost seven months and a hunger strike, he was released in February 2023. In a stunning legal victory, Iran’s Supreme Court overturned his original 2010 sentence. Panahi was legally free, but artistically still bound by a system he refuses to submit to.

“To make a film in the official way in Iran, you have to submit your script to the Islamic Guidance Ministry for approval,” he tells DW. “This is something I cannot do. I made another clandestine film. Again.”

That film, It Was Just An Accident, may be Panahi’s most direct confrontation yet with state violence and repression. Shot in secret and featuring unveiled female characters in defiance of Iran’s hijab law, the film tells the story of a group of ex-prisoners who believe they’ve found the man who tortured them — and must decide whether to exact revenge. The taut, 24-hour drama unfolds like a psychological thriller.

Stylistically, It Was Just An Accident is a sharp break from the more contained, and largely self-reflexive works Panahi made while under his official state ban, but the plot remains strongly autobiographical.

Thriller that cuts deep

The film opens with a banal tragedy — a man accidentally kills a dog with his car – and spirals into a slow-burning reckoning with state-sanctioned cruelty. Vahid (Valid Mobasseri), a mechanic who is asked to repair the damaged car, thinks he recognises the owner as Eghbal, aka Peg-Leg, his former torturer. He kidnaps him, planning to bury him alive in the desert. But he can’t be sure he’s got the right man, because he was blindfolded during his internment.

“They kept us blindfolded, during interrogation or when we left our cells,” Panahi recalls of his time in prison. “Only in the toilet could you remove the blindfold.”

Seeking reassurance, the mechanic reaches out to fellow prisoners for confirmation. Soon Vahid’s van is packed with victims seeking revenge on the man who abused them for nothing more than voicing opposition to the authorities. There’s a bride (Hadis Pakbaten) who abandons her wedding, together with her wedding photographer and former inmate Shiva (Maryam Afshari), to go after the man who raped and tortured her. There’s Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), a man so traumatised and so furious by his experience he doesn’t care if the man they’ve caught is the right guy; he just wants vengeance.

“Even dead, they’re a scourge on humanity,” he says of all the intelligence officers serving under the regime.

As the group debates vengeance vs non-violence, alongside brutal descriptions of the beatings and torture they endured, Panahi inserts sly moments of humour and touches of the absurd. The hostage-takers cross paths with Eghbal’s family, including his heavily pregnant wife, and suddenly find themselves rushing her to the hospital to give birth. Afterwards, as is tradition in Iran, Vahid heads to a bakery to buy everyone pastries.