Review: a triumph against a punitive regime

The day after receiving the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Iranian director Jafar Panahi was back in Tehran.

For those who’ve seen his latest film, 2025’s It Was Just an Accident, that is no small fact. The film tells the story of a former striking factory worker, now car mechanic, who impulsively kidnaps a man he believes to be the prison official who made his life hell. The film was made under the same clandestine conditions as Panahi’s last four (including the critically acclaimed Taxi Tehran), and shot entirely on location in Iran, despite Panahi having previously been sentenced to six years in prison and given a 20-year ban from writing, directing or producing films.

It Was Just an Accident was also nominated for several Oscars, only possible because it was co-produced by a French company, and officially nominated by France (Academy rules require the film to be screened for a week in the country nominating, which certainly wasn’t going to happen in Iran itself).

That Panahi himself has not been arrested or imprisoned since the film’s release must be the result of international media attention and the threat of bad press if he were to be rearrested. Filming had to stop on multiple occasions due to police interference, with Panahi and a reduced crew running around Tehran to capture the final scenes they needed after multiple crew members were summoned for questioning and banned from working with Panahi again.

Given the trials it went through just to reach the screen at all, the film is a triumph. In turns funny, exciting and extremely chilling, it draws together a group of former prisoners who don’t really know each other, all of whom attempt to ascertain whether the man they’ve captured truly is “Peg-leg” (the nickname given to the prison officer, who bragged of having lost a leg fighting in Syria), and what they should do with him if he is.

Thematically, Panahi doesn’t stray into anything too complex. While the setup of the film is striking and immediately engaging, it doesn’t then venture too far beyond asking “if violence is what this man did to us, would it not make us like him if we hurt him in return?” There are some other questions raised: whether the violence enacted by this man is an individual choice, or a logical outcome of “the system”; whether he truly believes in the cause, or did what he did because his job required him to; and how prisoners, of whom there are many in modern Iran, can build a life from the wreckage of the life they had before their sentences.

At least two of the characters, we’re told, were arrested for protesting in some manner, but neither are protestors now: one is a car mechanic, the other a wedding photographer, both of them trying to reconstruct a quiet life after their ordeals. While exceptions exist – Sepideh Gholian comes to mind – it is undeniable that punitive states that target protesting workers and activists have the effect of demobilising those they come into contact with. The resilience and longevity of the Iranian workers’ and feminist movements is all the more impressive because of it.

The focal point around which the film turns, in my mind, is the stories told by the prisoners from their time in captivity, each of them exorcising demons by recounting horrific tortures that “Peg-leg” put them through, including goading them about relatives dying, threats of sexual assault, and blindfolded mock executions. The climax, a long, agonising single shot bathed in the red of a car’s brake lights which I won’t spoil, is a brilliant exercise in building tension and suspense.

Shooting the film took place in stages: first, scenes were shot in the desert, which had the dual benefit of being visually striking and free from outside interference and CCTV. Next came trusted interiors: warehouses, bookshops and carparks. Finallly, the risky part: live footage in the streets of Tehran, first inside cars, then out in the open. It’s the final of these stages that brought police attention, and each scene shot in the city feels doubly tense: first for the (fictional) tied-up government employee in the van, second for the very real camera crew trying to finish the shot before getting arrested.

The result is a film that feels hard-won, but is also a genuine success on its own artistic terms. You should watch It Was Just an Accident not just because it’s a voice from inside Iran, or because it was made bravely, or because it makes a powerful political statement, though all those things are true. You should watch it because it’s a great film.