It was a shock when Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi showed up at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year; not so much when he won the Palme d’Or. The man is decorated as hell! Those awards have come through the decades of Panahi poking at the bear of the Iranian government and suffering the consequences: He’s been imprisoned twice, forbidden from making movies, and banned from leaving the country. Yet he’s still writing and directing in secret, increasingly with a meta framing in which Panahi plays himself in his films, as in 2022’s masterful No Bears. By premiering his upcoming film It Was Just an Accident at Cannes, Panahi delivered a double surprise — the existence of his 12th feature in the first place, and the fact that it’s a straightforward narrative, seemingly without the fourth-wall-breaking flourishes at which he has excelled.
Instead, It Was Just an Accident — made after Panahi’s release from prison in 2023, and scheduled for release October 15 by Neon — initially resembles the films of Panahi’s friend and former fellow inmate Mohammad Rasoulof, who in both 2020’s There Is No Evil and 2024’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig centered characters who work for Iran’s judicial or prison systems and questioned their morality. Panahi gives that format a twist. Within Iran, the identities of those men are protected; prisoners often wear blindfolds or masks when they’re being interrogated, and court employees’ names and addresses aren’t public information. In It Was Just an Accident, protagonist Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) becomes convinced that he’s found the man who interrogated him, and he abducts him as part of a revenge scheme. But then doubt creeps in: What if he hasn’t actually identified the correct man? As Vahid turns to friends of his who were also political prisoners to decide whether he’s got the right guy, It Was Just an Accident spins from a vengeful thriller into a larger interrogation of guilt, innocence, and the lies we tell ourselves and one another to survive.
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