Jafar Panahi’s Latest Rebellion Is ‘It Was Just an Accident’

The third time Iranian director Jafar Panahi was arrested, it was with his wife, his daughter, and 15 of his friends. It was March 2010, and he and Mohammad Rasoulof had been filming a movie that would examine, in Panahi’s typical social-realist style, how the recent disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the wave of protests that followed rippled through multiple generations of one family. The pair knew Iran’s conservative government, which reviews scripts and withholds permits for movies of which it doesn’t approve, would never let them make it. So they began filming at Panahi’s home in secret. They had nearly 30 percent of the movie shot when news of their project got out and his apartment was raided. “It’s not important how they found out,” Panahi tells me. “We just were not experienced enough, and we didn’t know how to hide it.”

Panahi, 65, and I are seated at the upscale restaurant Reign in Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York hotel along with theater historian and professor Sheida Dayani, who is serving as his translator during the press tour for his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, which was made in secret over 25 days on the streets of Tehran. (He’s since learned how to hide better.) He arrived in what I’ve come to think of as the Panahi uniform: darkly tinted glasses, a black polo shirt, and an army-green jacket with a whiff of cigarette smoke about him. (He goes through three packs a day.) His voice is a rich baritone, like a rumble coming from deep inside a mountain. He’s feeling a little under the weather today. In lieu of the Persian folk remedy nabat, or rock candy, he’s sipping from a mug of hot water with honey hours before It Was Just an Accident’s Toronto Film Festival premiere this past September, the sixth stop on a worldwide tour that began at Cannes in late May, where Panahi’s film took the Palme d’Or. With that award, he joined the “triple crown” club, comprising filmmakers who have won the top prize at Europe’s major film festivals, along with Venice and Berlin. (He has three predecessors: Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Robert Altman.)

Panahi’s 2010 imprisonment effectively split his career, and life, in two. While most of his group was released after two weeks, Panahi was not. For nearly three months, he was held in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, where many of the country’s political prisoners, activists, and professors are detained. When he was released, he was given a six-year sentence that the authorities could demand he serve at any time. He was also banned from leaving the country, giving interviews, or making films (the Supreme Court lifted all the bans in 2022). In the years since, life in one form of detention or another has become his norm. He’s channeled it all into his work, leading to the most creatively fruitful and high-profile stretch of his career, making five films that, together, form a mini-oeuvre. He named the first one, released in 2011, This Is Not a Film, a sly joke but also a kind of thesis for everything that would follow, meta-dramas that would blur the lines between reality and fiction. Panahi plays himself in these movies. We watch as he goes stir-crazy in his Tehran apartment after his 2010 conviction (This Is Not a Film) and as he drives around the city, picking up passengers who argue in the back of his cab (2015’s Taxi). “It was mischief, a kind of trick, a defiance of the political regime in Iran,” says Jamsheed Akrami, a professor emeritus and longtime friend of Panahi’s, of the director’s self-insertions, describing them as “cinematic selfies.” “You won’t allow me to travel physically? I can travel inside my movies.”

With It Was Just an Accident, Panahi returns to traditional narrative film. The revenge drama follows a group of Iranians who believe they’ve found the man who interrogated and tortured them in prison; after abducting him, they consider killing him. It’s sneakily funny and thrillingly paced, a story about vigilante justice punctuated by long one-take shots in which the characters debate the ethics of violence and what’s worth fighting for. It’s also the mark of a filmmaker who has met his moment. While Americans are newly wrestling with the experience of having their reality turned upside down, Iranians have been living through the looking glass for decades, ever since the 1979 revolution paved the way for a censorial Islamic regime. Surveillance is everywhere, and a political statement out of step with the ruling class’s beliefs can land you in jail. Better than any director working today, Panahi understands how detention can change a person on an atomic level, chipping away at their humanity. During his 2010 imprisonment, he tells me, he was often kept in isolation. One day, the guards made him strip and stand in the cold for an hour and a half. A week into his sentence, he was taken to a room, blindfolded, and seated in a cramped desk facing a wall. The tactic was time as pressure. His interrogators stood behind him, demanding he write down answers to their queries, quickening the pace with each question. Panahi speaks briskly and matter-of-factly until, abruptly, he stops.

“Why do you need these details?” he asks. “They are not really related to the film. I feel that you are interrogating me again.” Is it not relevant, I reply, given he and his characters have shared similar experiences? But the film isn’t personal, Panahi insists; it’s primarily shaped by stories he heard in Evin from other captives. He is also, perhaps, growing impatient. Throughout our conversation, his gaze shifts around the room, lingering on other diners. This is Panahi’s first press tour in 15 years, and it all may feel a little frivolous. The film’s North American distributor, Neon, the studio behind last year’s Best Picture winner, Anora, is positioning It Was Just an Accident for an Oscar run. Unsurprisingly, Iran did not select it for Best International Feature Film, but because Panahi completed the film’s postproduction and visual-effects work in Paris, where he lives part time, France chose it as its official submission, beating out films including Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague. 

We are both literally and figuratively thousands of miles from the conditions that have shaped Panahi’s reality for more than a decade. “Now that I’ve made the film,” he says, “I have to go outside and chert o pert”—an Iranian phrase that roughly translates to “talk nonsense.” “What kind of a life is this?” That’s Panahi: wry, sarcastic, mercurial. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which way a sentence is going to go. Like when I ask whether he was afraid while working on It Was Just an Accident. “What are they going to do with me that they haven’t done before?” he replies. “They banned me from leaving Iran. Did I change? They took me to prison. Did I change? What is left to do?” Short of being exiled by the government, Panahi could never leave Iran, he says. Away from home, he grows restless, bored, disoriented. To a certain degree, he knows he is protected by his fame. “If they touch me, the entire world will know,” he says. With each film, he is playing a game of chicken with the regime. “Let them come and ban me from leaving again,” Panahi continues, half-smirking. His eyes light up as he finishes the thought. “Actually, I would love that because I’d have an excuse to concentrate on my work. We really should have a movement where governments around the world ban filmmakers from giving interviews.”

Panahi grew up in a working-class neighborhood in southern Tehran, one of seven children. His earliest memory of becoming socially conscious was in elementary school. On test days, his teacher, Mr. Kalantari, would require students to turn in bribes of a few coins along with their exams. “If we didn’t, he would not give us a good grade,” Panahi explains. The little injustice lingered in his memory, a moment in which an adult betrayed the children in his care.

When he was around 10, he acted in a short film for Kanoon, an arts-education program; on that set, he became fixated on looking through the lens of the camera. “Unfortunately the cinematographer would not let me look,” Panahi says. Years later, he saved up enough money to purchase his own camera. Photography “changed my gaze,” he says. His father, a housepainter, admired movies but only allowed his son to watch films of which he approved. Panahi saw others in secret anyway. In his free time, he made vats of homemade drinks to sell at soccer stadiums and helped his father on jobs. He’d save up his money, cut school, and some times, end up in the same theater as his father.

His last year of high school coincided with the Iranian Revolution, a people’s movement against the U.S.-backed reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under the shah’s secular rule, Iranians had been economically depressed and struggled against tightening social freedoms. Panahi and his classmates were among the first in their school to start demonstrating in the streets. “Everybody was actively involved, from the extreme right to the extreme left,” he said. “People were hoping for a democratic society, which unfortunately didn’t materialize.” Instead, they got a regime that, among other constraints, made the hijab compulsory for women in public, segregated outdoor spaces by gender, and gave men expansive marital and domestic rights.

After the revolution, Panahi was conscripted into military service. During his training period, he and his friends were captured by armed Kurdish rebels and held for about 80 days. He tried to reason with them—he didn’t choose to serve in the military, after all, it was mandatory—and staged a hunger strike. His fellow prisoners coached him on how to maintain it by drinking one cup of tea filled halfway with sugar each day. About six days into his protest, the rebels let Panahi and his friends go.

As part of his military service, Panahi took his camera with him to the southern front of the Iran-Iraq War, where he filmed operations that aired on TV as documentaries in Iranian Kurdistan. By the time Panahi was in college, he was beginning to test the boundaries of what was allowed in his work. For his first student film project at Tehran’s College of Cinema and Television, he persuaded the faculty to give him three cameras for three days, instead of the customary one camera for ten days, so he could shoot more coverage. His resulting 30-minute documentary, The Wounded Heads, followed a group of Shi’a Muslims from Azerbaijan who would wound themselves while mourning the religious figure Imam Hossein on the holy day of Ashura. The government has condemned those ceremonies, Panahi says, which fueled his desire to document them. “My sole purpose was to record what was happening,” he explains. His schooling was subsidized by the government and came with a commitment to work for a few years for Iranian state TV channels. Panahi was learning how the system worked while pursuing his own creative projects at the same time, assisting on the sets of filmmakers including Abbas Kiarostami, a leading figure in Iran’s New Wave movement who pioneered meta-filmmaking techniques and became a mentor to Panahi.

The Iranian cinematic tradition is nearly a century old, and social critique has always been embedded within it. During the shah’s reign, filmmakers wrapped their civic appraisals in allegory, like Dariush Mehrjui’s 1969 Iranian New Wave classic, The Cow, about how a cow’s death spins its owner into unhinged chaos. The shah banned the film for its depiction of the hardships of Iranian rural life. “Back then, it was a secular censorship, mostly rooted in political causes. After the revolution, they kept that political censorship and added religious codes,” Akrami says. Directors working after the 1979 Revolution, like Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Majid Majidi, tucked observations about Iran’s economy, patriarchy, and religious dynamics within their work.

Using children as protagonists was a particularly canny way to analyze social issues from the perspective of an innocent. Kiarostami’s “Koker” trilogy follows a child trying to return his classmate’s notebook and spins off into a series of interwoven stories about poverty, gender roles, and communal resilience. Panahi followed suit with his first feature-length film, The White Balloon, using a pair of siblings trying to find a goldfish for their Nowruz, or New Year, celebration to dramatize economic hardship. Kiarostami wrote the script, and Panahi directed. He received the 1995 Prix de la Caméra d’Or at Cannes, given to the best first feature film. His next movie, 1997’s The Mirror, which he wrote himself, also had shades of Kiarostami: a child protagonist, a fourth-wall-breaking moment.

Panahi’s work up to this point might have been considered inoffensive, even safe, which made his next film, 2000’s The Circle, a major shift. He began developing it after reading a newspaper story about a woman who killed her children and then herself; he was struck by the desperation that had led her to such an act. “If you make films about the realities of Iran, you can’t ignore the restrictions on women,” he says. By the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, women’s enrollment in universities was beginning to rival men’s. Women also played a dominant role in the 1999 student protests in Tehran, sparked by the shutdown of a reformist newspaper. They spread through the country after a violent raid on a Tehran University dormitory. Amid all this, censors were sitting on Panahi’s script, only giving in after reformist newspapers took up his cause.

The resulting film was a meticulously crafted ensemble piece about Iran’s androcentric culture, following a group of women through dehumanizing confrontations with their relatives, strangers, and the police. “He completely transformed himself and the kind of movies he was making,” Akrami says of The Circle. “His vision became bolder and also darker.” Once the film was complete, Iran banned it. Panahi went on to describe it as his “first film.”

The Circle was the first in a trio of critical-of-the-Establishment films that also includes 2003’s Crimson Gold (about a mentally ill veteran who robs a jewelry store) and 2006’s Offside (in which a group of young women try to sneak into a soccer match). Both Crimson Gold and Offside were banned inside Iran, and Panahi was arrested and interrogated after the former film was recognized at Cannes. His relationship with the government was growing increasingly contentious. Not that he was looking for approval anymore. Panahi, along with other up-and-coming filmmakers, began circumventing the official channels, sending one version of his films’ scripts to government censors and filming another. As soon as he finished his work, he’d send a reel (these days a link) to a film festival. Akrami refers to this as Iran’s “parallel cinema” movement. “Right now, it’s only those so-called unauthorized movies that get shown in international festivals. They don’t get shown in Iran,” he explains. “Interestingly, none of the movies that go through official channels get shown at international festivals.” For awards like the Oscars, Iran tends to choose films that don’t portray the Islamic Republic in an explicitly negative light—mostly war movies or domestic dramas. (Panahi has advocated for a change to the Academy’s rules for the international category, arguing that a committee of filmmakers should select the nominees instead of forcing directors to go through the very governments that may be suppressing their work.) In recent years, Asghar Farhadi, engineer of devastating renderings of couples and their often contrasting reactions to breaches of social etiquette, has been a particular favorite of both the regime and the Academy. (He has also been vocal in his support of more confrontational filmmakers, including Panahi.) In 2011, the same year Farhadi’s Oscar-winning A Separation premiered, Panahi’s This Is Not a Film was smuggled into Cannes on a USB stick.

The morning of It Was Just an Accident’s Toronto premiere, Panahi stops by the historic Royal Alexandra Theatre for a sound check. Inside the theater, he claps his hands to assess the acoustics; he asks how many seats there are (1,244) because that will influence how loud he wants the film to be; he recites time codes off the top of his head when the theater crew asks which scenes he wants to test. The sound of a footstep is incredibly important in the film, and he’s particularly concerned that it be audible over the upcoming sellout crowd. He leans forward in his chair and takes off his glasses for the three scenes we watch, then goes back and forth with the theater tech about bumping up the sound. “The film has no soundtrack. There’s no music. It’s all the sound effects,” Panahi says. The sound is currently at the theater’s standard 7.0—how about 7.3? Or 7.5? “Also, the image is a little dull, perhaps. It’s kind of opaque,” he adds. Could someone take a look at the sharpness before tonight? The scenes roll again with the louder volume setting, and Panahi is visibly pleased. A moment when a flock of birds takes off excites him the most; the flutter of the wings now sounds distinct, powerful. “The birds that just started flying, you can feel it,” he says, satisfied. The sound will stay at 7.5.

Out of necessity, Panahi’s aesthetic has grown minimalistic. There are rarely artificial-lighting setups and usually only a compact camera filming the action. Natural light “creates a more honest effect in the end,” says It Was Just an Accident cinematographer Amin Jafari, who also shot Panahi’s 3 Faces and No Bears. Panahi is an extensive planner, and scenes require, at most, two or three takes. He works with a small crew—traveling with a cinematographer, editor, cameraperson, and sound recorder, as well as the actors needed for the scene—and edits as he shoots, adding to the speed with which his films come together.

Certain elements recur in his later work: cars driving down abandoned dirt roads, night scenes, or ones filmed in tightly contained spaces. There’s a clandestine quality to it all. Even in his fiction, he restricts his movements, imposing boundaries while at the same time draining them of their meaning. In 2022’s formalist masterpiece No Bears, Panahi travels as far north as he can, to a tiny village where he remotely directs a movie that is shooting across the border in Turkey via video chat. In one scene, he drives to a hilltop in the middle of the night for a secret meeting with his assistant director, Reza Heydari; Turkey is visible in the distance. Panahi asks him where the actual border is. “You are standing on it,” Reza replies. Panahi quickly steps back. No one is there to police him, but the power and fear he has given the imaginary line is too strong; what determines the truth, he seems to be saying, is how much you’ve invested in the lie.

It was Panahi’s second go-around in Evin that inspired It Was Just an Accident. He landed there again in July 2022 as unrest was spreading through Iran—fueled by concerns over the economy, natural resources, and overdevelopment and later culminating in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, sparked by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Zhina Amini, who was arrested and beaten for how she wore her hijab. The government had recently arrested filmmakers Rasoulof and Mostafa al-Ahmad, who had expressed support for protesters online. When Panahi visited a prosecutor’s office to ask why they’d been detained, he was arrested too and ordered to serve the six-year sentence from 2010. “There was a law saying if ten years goes by and a sentence doesn’t get executed, they cannot execute,” says Panahi, who was let go shortly after he staged a hunger strike in February 2023. “They took me illegally for seven months.”

This time, Panahi was kept in a larger space with people from all walks of life, some of whom had been in Evin for decades. “We didn’t have much to do, so everything we did was together,” Panahi says of his bond with other inmates, in particular his deepening friendship with Rasoulof  and Mehdi Mahmoudian, a journalist and activist who covers Iran’s prison system. “We’d watch films that were smuggled into the prison, we’d talk, we’d kill bedbugs together.” One day, he and Rasoulof were taken to the prison’s cultural office; some of the guards were cinephiles too, and they wanted the filmmakers to make a movie for them in prison. Taken aback, they replied that they didn’t have a cameraman. One officer replied, “Who do you want? We can arrest any cameraman you like!”

When Panahi was released, he remembers hearing the ongoing Woman, Life, Freedom protests on the streets of Tehran. It felt surreal to be on the outside. Months passed, and he couldn’t stop thinking about all the friends he had left inside. “Okay, now what?” Panahi asked himself. “The stories you have heard, the things you have seen, are not going to leave you just like that.” He began developing an idea on a trip with his friends Nader Saeivar and Shadmehr Rastin. It hinged on whether someone would be able to recognize their interrogator in the wild, an idea Akrami says Panahi first experimented with about 15 years ago, when he wrote an adaptation of the 1990 play Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman. In that work, a Latin American woman and political prisoner believes she has found the doctor who tortured and raped her, and she abducts him to her home in order to torture him as revenge; when her husband finds out, he’s horrified by her actions. Panahi was planning to start work on the film after Offside and was ready to fly to Paris to meet with producers. Before he could, he was given his first sentence at Evin. After that, Akrami adds, “the project was dismantled.”

It Was Just an Accident bears similarities to Death and the Maiden—in Panahi’s film, former prisoners Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), Shiva (Maryam Afshari), Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), along with Golrokh’s fiancé, Ali (Majid Panahi, Jafar’s nephew), abduct a man they know as Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), whom Vahid suspects may have been the interrogator who emotionally and physically abused them in prison and whom they recognize by the sound of his artificial leg squeaking as he moves. But It Was Just an Accident is less about what the prisoners do to Eghbal and more about their anger over what prison stole from their lives and how it gave shape to their individual ideas of justice. Panahi gives his ensemble dialogue-rich scripts, built around the rhythm of debate. Mahmoudian, the journalist Panahi befriended in Evin, advised on the dialogue, particularly the lines delivered by the interrogator. “He had more experience than the rest of us, and he knew these people better than we did,” Panahi says.

Most of the actors in It Was Just an Accident are amateur performers or people for whom acting is a side gig. Jafari says the director’s guerrilla techniques benefit newcomers: “Many of the actors, it’s their first experience. When they all of a sudden encounter huge equipment, it makes them not be themselves. And Mr. Panahi is always adamant about asking the actors to be themselves.” It was through Saeivar that Panahi found his lead actress, Maryam Afshari, who plays the activist turned wedding photographer Shiva. Afshari is a karate referee and coach who worked as Saeivar’s assistant and briefly acted in his 2024 film, The Witness, on which Panahi consulted. After observing Afshari on that set, Panahi contacted her for a meeting; Afshari walked out of work at Iran’s Karate Federation that day. “I told my work I need to leave right away because working with Mr. Panahi was a dream,” Afshari says. “I thought that he wanted to have me as his assistant.” At his home, Panahi showed Afshari the script, let her read it, and gave her 24 hours to decide whether she wanted to accept a role, the same offer he made to all the film’s actors. Her answer, she says, was “immediate.”

Afshari was personally involved in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement—she was beaten and shot at during the protests and thrown into a transport van until a few men came to her aid and got her out. She could relate to Shiva, a level-headed woman trying to put the past behind her. As Shiva, Afshari is a revelation of steely resolve, a pragmatist who holds fast to her conciliatory principles until a final scene that pushes her capacity for mercy to its limits. “I kept thinking of Nika, one of the girls who was murdered during the movement, and of those men who were with her in that van and did to her what they did and would do to me what they did to her,” Afshari says, referencing 16-year-old Nika Shakarami, who was abducted from the protests and found dead days later. “If I had my hands on them, I would probably tear them into pieces, and that really kept raising my rage.”

It Was Just an Accident was filmed over about four weeks in Tehran. Most of it occurs in a remote desert or in a van, the back of which the group stuffs itself into alongside Eghbal, whom they’ve blindfolded and restrained in a storage box. But certain climactic scenes also play out on Tehran’s bustling streets. “Panahi has this reputation as a street filmmaker in Iran,” Akrami explains, because of his early tendency to embed himself within the public and hide in plain sight. Still, they were raided once by police, who swarmed the production as they were filming in the Shahrak-e Gharb neighborhood in the summer of 2024. No one quite knows how their location was leaked—maybe it was because it was their second day filming in the same location, Jafari says—but Panahi and his team were prepared. They slid an empty memory card into a camera and handed it over. Editor Amir Etminan had all the footage filmed until that point saved on his laptop in the back of the car, along with a bag of prop SLR cameras that wedding photographer Shiva uses in the film. As the police were searching his car, Etminan feinted toward the bag of cameras and pretended to be protecting them passionately, leading the authorities to believe they held footage. They left with the empty memory card and the prop cameras, while the laptop remained. The crew waited nearly three weeks before going back into production for three final days.

It Was Just an Accident moves briskly between its characters’ feuding opinions about vengeance. In a lengthy scene in the desert, the camera pans to each character, isolating them or putting them in pairings to argue, bicker, and reveal themselves. Hamid, the hothead of the group, is eager to kill Eghbal. Shiva, his tensely coiled ex, points out that the problem is with the system, not any individual person. “These scumbags created the system!” Hamid yells. Each character, including Eghbal, gets to say their piece. Watching the film, Mahmoudian says, he was reminded of one day in Evin this past June (he was released on September 15). Israel had just bombed Iran, sparking a nearly two-week war during which 1,200 Iranians and 31 Israelis were killed. The worst single attack was on Evin—about 80 people, including prisoners and employees, were killed in what some human-rights organizations have called a war crime. “It happened at a time when we all had the concept of nonviolent resistance in mind,” Mahmoudian says. Which is why, even as their lives were at risk, they pulled many of their captors out of the debris. “We saved their lives,” Mahmoudian recalls. “Some of us even treated their wounds, gave them drinks.” Not everyone was like this, he continues: “Some people chose not to help the interrogators; some thought about escaping. The same applied to the interrogators themselves. One group expressed appreciation while another—the very people we had just got out of the rubble, whose wounds we had treated—stood up and opened fire on us as soon as they got help.”

In a car on the way to the premiere of It Was Just an Accident, Panahi stops at a convenience store, where a publicist hops out to buy him cigarettes for the next few days (six packs). He walks the red carpet in a cream suit. BBC Persian reporter Peyman Khajehhssanirabori asks Panahi for his thoughts on people laughing during the film. The film’s humor was intentional, Panahi explains, adding that Iranians can’t allow the regime to take joy from them. Later, as the film plays, the crowd bursts intermittently into laughter, cracking up at the clown-car quality of everyone piling into the van for the first time. Panahi grins when moments of physical comedy land. (The 7.5-level sound in the theater is excellent.) Various elements of the film nod to Panahi’s prior filmography, like an innocent child worried about her pregnant mother, but most impactful is the directness with which various characters ask: To whom does Iran belong? Is a country solely a reflection of its regime, or does it belong to the millions of people who live within it and don’t necessarily agree with the government’s actions? Who gets to decide?

Those are relatable questions for viewers, wherever they come from. After the screening ended, the people in the row behind me burst into a fevered discussion about who was right, who was wrong, and what the film’s final minutes mean; its conclusions about the virtues of vigilante justice play out with a certain amount of ambiguity. Panahi is more concerned with preserving this moment in time, this potential precipice of change, for Iran and for all of us. “You will ask yourself, How could a regime with all this apparatus allow you to even make a film like this? But because I’m inside, I know how to find my way through the crevices and the pathways. I know how to go through the street and come back,” Panahi tells me. “This film is made for a time for which there is no history yet.”