Enemy of the state: Jafar Panahi on It Was Just an Accident

“What can they do that they haven’t already done?” says Jafar Panahi about his long-term conflict with the Iranian authorities. “Do they want to put me back into prison? Ban me from leaving the country? Ban me from working, all over again? They know that, as a social filmmaker, the moment they put me in any situation I’ll make a film about it. If they hadn’t put me in prison, I would certainly not have made It Was Just an Accident.” 

It was his experience in prison, and experiences that others told him about, that inspired Panahi’s latest film, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or in Cannes – the first international festival that the director had attended for more than 15 years. His experience throughout that period has been both bitter and triumphant, and has made Panahi an exemplary figure in contemporary film, his sheer commitment as an artist leading to a series of outstandingly compelling and inventive cinematic statements. 

In 2010, Panahi – then with five features to his name, starting with his 1995 debut The White Balloon – was placed by the Islamic Republic under house arrest and given a 20-year ban on making films or writing scripts. That ban directly inspired his 2011 feature This Is Not a Film, co-directed with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. It showed Panahi cooped up in his Tehran flat, seemingly not making a film while nevertheless very much making one – a buoyant, conceptual two-fingers-up at state persecution. 

Panahi continued to flout the ban with a series of self-reflexive films in which he again appeared. These commented both on his own quandary as a filmmaker and, more generally, on the repressions facing Iranian citizens; this cycle included the sombre Closed Curtain (2013, co-directed with Kambozia Partovi), the jubilant comic-serious Taxi Tehran (2015), 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022). 

Throughout that period, Panahi endured brutal personal difficulties. He has been imprisoned twice, most recently in 2022, after protesting against the arrests of two other filmmakers, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad. That sentence ended in February 2023, two days after he began a hunger strike in Tehran’s Evin prison. Eventually, an Iranian supreme court decision quashed his original conviction, cancelling the restrictions on his activity.

Now free to travel, Panahi has since Cannes been promoting It Was Just an Accident on the international festival circuit (the French-financed film is France’s official entry in the Academy Awards). He was to have come to London in October, but was prevented by complications arising from a delay in obtaining a US visa. The interview material that follows is taken from two hour-long video-call conversations with Panahi, and a translator, while he was in the States: one was specifically for Sight and Sound, the other was for the BFI London Film Festival, to replace a planned on-stage discussion.

It Was Just an Accident is the first Panahi film since Offside (2006) in which he has not himself appeared, either as a central figure or as observer of the crises of others. In It Was Just an Accident, he pulls back on the self-reflexivity in favour of a direct, intense and very angry drama – with a caustic streak of absurdist humour. A chance incident on a road leads to a garage mechanic named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) hearing the creak of a man’s prosthetic leg and identifying him as Eqbal, an interrogator who tormented him and others in prison. Vahid kidnaps the man (Ebrahim Azizi) and enlists a group of other former political prisoners to help identify him for certain – and decide his fate.

“As a social filmmaker,” Panahi tells me, “I get my ideas and my inspiration from the place I live in. If I’m taken out of my natural environment and placed in another one, that environment will automatically have an impact on me.

“While I was in prison, I was talking to my fellow inmates and hearing about their troubles. When you are released, you have all these things you’ve heard. You feel the weight of the responsibility to your fellow inmates who are still inside, and you wonder what you could do for them. Then you wonder what film you should make, and you start from the one common experience that ties you all together, all the political prisoners – namely, that everyone has been interrogated.”

Panahi has said that during his first prison sentence, he was interrogated while blindfolded, which gave him the idea of a man recognising his interrogator from sound alone. Vahid was arrested, we learn, for “propaganda and collusion against the regime”; Panahi’s own sentences were on similarly worded grounds. But that does not necessarily make Vahid a surrogate for Panahi within the film, the director insists.

“Vahid is a manual labourer who just ended up in jail because he wasn’t getting paid and he complained about it. He was imprisoned as a political prisoner although he has no specific political stance, he doesn’t belong to a political group. When you go to prison in Iran, you find a lot of prisoners just like him, who really are not political prisoners, but are treated as such.

“I feel close to all my characters, and I need to portray them without taking sides. If you make a film of this sort and choose to be close to one character over any other, then you’re not respecting a principle of justice as a director.”

It Was Just an Accident is about moral choices. One of the abductors says of Eqbal, “I swear I can make him talk”; another responds, “Using their methods?” Some of the characters are tempted to do just that, while others are inclined to show mercy, not just to their prisoner but to his family. But how close, in his ordeals, did Panahi himself come to feeling the murderous anger some of these characters feel?

“I think it’s important,” he replies, “to distinguish myself as Jafar Panahi, the person outside the film, from me as Jafar Panahi, the director of the film. As a director, I have no intention of bringing the person I am outside cinema into the film. Outside the film, I have very clear and, I feel, very radical political stances, but I make sure these do not interfere with the film itself.”

Despite these caveats, It Was Just an Accident comes across as Panahi’s most direct attack on the current Iranian regime – and indeed a forecast of its downfall, a sounding of the cracks in its stability. “Why dig their graves?” one character says. “They’ve done it for themselves” (indeed, a grave is literally dug for Eqbal). The key political change that underlies the film is the emergence of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protest movement that began in Iran in 2022, against the enforcement and policing of the hijab (the movement was also a key element in Rasoulof’s 2024 feature The Seed of the Sacred Fig).

Panahi – who had directly addressed the situation of Iranian women in his films The Circle (2000) and Offside – was in prison when the movement emerged, so was unable to follow it closely. “It was only when I came out that I could take stock of this huge ongoing change, led by women who show this extraordinary courage and resilience. They were killed, imprisoned, tortured, shot in the eyes – yet they kept coming out on to the streets without the mandatory hijab, kept going regardless.

“When this kind of seismic change takes place, it influences every aspect of life. If you claim to be a social filmmaker, this will affect your work, and if you’re not ready to fight alongside the women who are heading the revolt, you should at least make sure that you’re not [lagging] behind them. And because of this amazing change, the regime was on the retreat for the first time.” For his country, he says, “there’s before Woman, Life, Freedom and there’s after.”

It’s worth noting that when it comes to translating his words, Panahi is very emphatic about his distinction between Iran the country and the ‘Islamic Republic’, meaning the existing regime: the latter, he says, “has nothing to do with the will of the people of Iran and it does not represent them.”

Women are indeed the most forceful figures in It Was Just an Accident. Vahid may start the ball rolling, but among his group is the righteously furious Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), a young woman who joins them on the eve of her wedding, her bridal gown adding comic incongruity to a savagely intense situation. Then there is the photographer taking the wedding pictures – Shiva (Maryam Afshari), whose combat-style gear and rejection of the headscarf signal her defiant identity. “Shiva is very dynamic, very active, very direct, a natural leader. That’s why we worked so much on this character – because it is a woman, just as in Woman, Life, Freedom, who takes her destiny in her hands and gets people to speak the truth.”

Although the 2023 decision meant Panahi is no longer banned from filmmaking, he is still required to seek script approval from Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance – something he refuses to do. He continues, therefore, to film surreptitiously, using low-budget methods that adapt to circumstance (Taxi Tehran, for example, was filmed entirely in and around a taxi cab, with Panahi playing himself at the wheel).

It Was Just an Accident was no exception. “Once again I needed to film underground with a very small cast and crew, paying great attention to all security matters. You have to start by filming everywhere that there’s a smaller chance of being arrested, from natural locations – faraway places, the desert – to interiors, like a bookshop. Then you move on to other places where [you’re more likely] to be seen – you’re going towards progressive danger.”

Indeed, the police clamped down on Panahi’s shoot two days before it was due to end, confiscating material; the next day, several participants were summoned for interrogation. It is well known what Panahi himself has endured over the years; what about his casts and crews? “The fact is,” he says, “the regime is always most concerned about the director. That doesn’t mean that there are no dangers for collaborators. Of course, they face great dangers, especially the actresses who appear without the headscarf. But they all chose these risks in full awareness of what collaborating could entail. They took part from the bottom of their hearts with all their energy and with the deep belief that it was something important that we had to do.”

For years now, long before his 2010 ban, Panahi has operated under difficult conditions and fallen foul of Iran’s censors. The proscription against filming, however, raised the difficulty of directing to new heights, and inspired him to devise ever more slyly inventive methods – which in some cases, as in No Bears, became part of the films’ subject matter.

What is remarkable throughout his troubles is just how buoyant Panahi’s cinema has remained. One exception is Closed Curtain, which he admits he made while experiencing a serious depression. Other films, including 3 Faces and No Bears, may deal with troubling subject matter, but they too display lightness and humour, while in Taxi Tehran Panahi is seen pretty much beaming throughout. How did he manage to find resilience, even joy, in such tough times?

He ascribes it to a certain aspect of Iranian culture. “It’s a very ironic, humorous culture where people are constantly making jokes, even about the most tragic events – something happens and five minutes later a joke has already been invented. With It Was Just an Accident, I worked very hard lifting the tone throughout, making all the grief, all the real problems that the film depicts as light as possible, elevating them. That way we can reach the last scene and be ready to encounter something so heavy and so deep that you leave the cinema unable to think of anything else.”

Today Panahi is determined to keep filming, and specifically to do so in his own country. “If I didn’t have to do all this travel for the awards campaign, I’d be in Iran, and I wish I was in Iran right now. In a way, I was incredibly fortunate to be banned from leaving my country for all those years, because the moment I’d finished one film, I’d start planning the next.”

There is one dream project that Panahi has been pursuing for some 20 years now: a film about war. “This is the one film that I’d love to do now – especially now that you can smell war all across the globe. I lived through a war – I was drafted as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq War, and it influenced me in the same way that being in prison prompted me to make It Was Just an Accident. But the film I’m thinking of has a global dimension, much bigger than just that war.”

You can imagine that Panahi’s recent achievements have inspired other struggling artists in his country. And, he suggests, his work has changed the language of Iranian cinema, certainly its methods. “I remember, shortly before my sentence, a lot of film students would visit me and tell me how hard it was becoming to make films. Then I got this ban – my natural tendency is to start complaining, but then I realised I wanted to find a way ahead.”

The effect was really noticeable, Panahi says, after the international success of Taxi Tehran (which won the 2015 Golden Bear in Berlin). “They stopped complaining how difficult things were, and instead took up this way of making films. Many of my friends have also have made films the same way, underground – and they’ve often done it much better than me.” 

• Thanks to Iante Roach for translation.