For more than a decade, after the government of Iran deemed his work “propaganda against the system,” the filmmaker Jafar Panahi was banned from making films or leaving the country. He spent some of that time in prison and under house arrest, but he still found ways to produce art—including the 2011 documentary This Is Not a Film, which was recorded in his Tehran apartment and smuggled into the Cannes film festival on a flash drive. The ban has since been lifted; even so, Panahi chose to make his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, in secret, without an official permit. This month, he showed the thriller at the New York Film Festival.
Much of Iran’s clandestine cinema, including some of Panahi’s earlier works, is didactic, focused on valorizing the victims of the regime’s injustices. But It Was Just an Accident turns the camera inward, toward the pugnacious debates that pit Iranians against one another.
Set in contemporary Tehran, It Was Just an Accident tackles a conundrum familiar to dissidents and revolutionaries. A former political prisoner chances upon a man he suspects is the interrogator who tortured him in prison. (He was blindfolded at the time but thinks he recognizes the squeak of the man’s artificial leg.) He takes the man hostage, then, panicking about his decision, gathers a group of former inmates. As they drive around in a van with the man, they fight about whether they have the right guy and, if so, what they should do with him. The question becomes more urgent when they encounter the man’s young daughter and very pregnant wife.
[Read: Silenced at home, Iranian filmmaker finds eager audience in France]
When we met up in New York, Panahi told me that the film grew out of the seven months that he spent in Evin Prison in 2022 and 2023, as Iran was roiled by protests under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom.” What began as an outcry against the hijab mandate quickly grew into a movement challenging the country’s clerical rule. Iranians began to debate whether violence should be used against the regime, and to ask how various opposition groups could build coalitions with one another.
The dissidents in the film disagree not just over the treatment of their captive and his family but also over how they should be living. The young, hotheaded Hamid, who has been unable to find a well-paying job since being released from prison, sees himself as risking everything for the cause, and he shames the others for pursuing careers and getting on with their lives. He keeps reminding them that “we are at war.” The others, led by Hamid’s ex-girlfriend Shiva, an artist who makes a living as a wedding photographer, believe that their prisoner should be given the chance to defend himself. (Hamid wants to simply off him and bury him in the desert.)
“Each of the characters represents something I saw either in prison or in the society at large,” Panahi told me. “I wanted each tendency to have its own representative, whether the nonviolent ones or the pro-violence ones. If you didn’t have someone like Hamid in the film, it would be all a lie.”
Panahi is a household name in Iran, one of the regime’s most prominent critics; earlier this year, he called for a stop to the Iran-Israel war and asked the country’s leadership to step aside and make space for a democratic transition. But he is adamant that his work is not political. “Political films are partisan and divide people into good or bad,” he told me. “I am a social filmmaker, and in social films, there is no absolute good or bad. You don’t judge. The audience decides.”
[Read: ‘This war is not helping us’]
Still, it’s clear where Panahi’s sympathies lie. Hamid’s character is a stark warning against extremism in social movements. Instead of finding ways to unite with his van mates against their common foe, he keeps bickering with them. Hamid accuses Ali, the only member of the group who is not a former political prisoner (he’s tagging along with his fiancée), of belonging to the “gray stratum”—the term for Iranians who are not aligned with the regime but who are too afraid to join the opposition. During an onstage talk with Martin Scorsese at the New York Film Festival, Panahi said he was concerned with the question of whether the “cycle of violence” would continue in Iran even if the Islamic Republic came to an end.
A few years ago, Panahi was imprisoned with the Iranian sociologist Saeed Madani, who taught his fellow inmates classes on the history of nonviolent resistance movements. When prison authorities barred Madani from teaching in his cell, he resorted to leading walking classes. Strolling in the prison courtyard with Panahi and others, including the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, Madani preached the principles of nonviolence. The scene is surreal to imagine, like something straight out of a Panahi movie.
Panahi had been imprisoned before; he spent a few months in Evin Prison in 2010. When we spoke, he relayed a conversation from back then with an interrogator who’d asked why he made the films he did. “I told him I made what I saw in society. For instance, even though I couldn’t see his face, all this conversation would probably make it into a film,” Panahi said. Indeed, the conversation inspired a scene in his 2015 film, Taxi, which featured Panahi as a driver interacting with a cross section of Iranian society. In the scene, Panahi trades grisly interrogation stories with the activist and fellow former political prisoner Nasrin Sotoudeh. Shot entirely in a car so that he could avoid the authorities, the film won him the Golden Bear at the Berlinale.
Panahi is one of the most decorated filmmakers alive, having won the top awards at the three major European festivals. Only three other directors have achieved the same. It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May. (In his acceptance speech, Panahi called on Iranians to get over their differences so that they could “get to freedom sooner.”) France has chosen the film as its candidate for Best International Feature Film at next year’s Oscars. (The film was eligible to be France’s pick because a French production company helped finance it.)
Panahi has won this international acclaim while telling only Iranian stories set in Iran. For years, however, he has hoped to adapt a novel by the Iranian writer Ahmad Dehghan that is set partly during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War and is about the futility of conflict; because of the scale of the story, Panahi would have to film it abroad. He envisions a retelling that wouldn’t reference any particular location and that would feel universal. “I always think I haven’t made my best film yet, and I think this might be it,” he told me.
[Read: Anything could happen in Iran]
This was Panahi’s first visit to the United States since 2000, and he was shocked by what he encountered. “I’ve seen people whispering because they think someone might be listening. I see a fear in this society that I can’t believe,” he told me. He worried that Americans won’t stand up for their rights, because unlike Europeans, they don’t have a generous social safety net to fall back on. “They’ll fire them if they speak out,” he said. He recognizes the signs of encroaching autocracy. “We in Iran live in a future that others might yet come to see,” he said.
But Panahi remains hopeful. “Regimes like Iran’s can’t last,” he told me. “History proves this. They won’t last. So we need to worry about what comes next.”
“Without hope, you can’t make films,” he said.
