3 December 2025

It Was Just an Accident is a reckoning with the Iranian regime

Jafar Panahi’s experience as a prisoner makes his film a potent political statement

Jafar Panahi’s new film, It Was Just an Accident, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, begins in misdirection.

A family are driving in the countryside near Tehran at night. We’re looking in on them through the windscreen of their car: a man and a pregnant woman in a headscarf in the front, an enchanting little girl bopping around to pop music in the back, imploring her dad to turn the volume up. Suddenly the car hits something. The man stops and gets out to see what it was. An animal is whimpering, a wild dog perhaps.

“Thank God we’re safe and sound,” says his wife. “It was just an accident. What will be will be. God surely put it in our way for a reason.” The little girl is upset, though. “You killed it,” she says. “God has nothing to do with it.” They set off again but the car has been damaged and they stop outside a workshop to ask for help.

So far, all our sympathies are with the family and we assume it’s their story we’ll be following, in another of the picaresque car journeys that are such a staple of Iranian cinema. But the film swerves another way. At the workshop, the driver of the car (Ebrahim Azizi) walks around and we notice he has an odd gait – in fact, a squeaky prosthetic leg. And a mechanic in the garage, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), while chatting to his mum on his mobile, hears this sound and is transfixed by it, becoming distressed and angry. He follows the tow truck to the man’s home. The next day, driving a grubby white van, Vahid ambushes the man, beats him with a shovel, takes him out into the desert, and digs a hole to bury him alive.

For this man, we are told, was, some years before, Vahid’s torturer in prison, a sadistic servant of the regime, known as Eghbal or Peg Leg. Although always blindfolded, Vahid recognises him just by the sound of his false leg. But the man protests that he is not Eghbal and his injury is recent. Vahid inspects his weeping stump and becomes uncertain. Stowing Eghbal, tightly bound, in the toolbox of the van, he sets off to ask other former prisoners if they are sure it is him and if so what he should do.

So begins a different journey, largely filmed in and around the van, progressively revealing the extent of the cruelty in prison and the way it traumatises its many victims. One former prisoner, a calm bookshop owner, advises Vahid against taking revenge. “We aren’t killers. We’re not like them. There’s no need to dig their graves – they’ve done it themselves.” Another, though, goes berserk when he says he recognises Eghbal and has to be restrained from killing him on the spot.

It Was Just an Accident is the first feature Panahi has made since his release from Evin prison in February 2023, after serving seven months for protesting on behalf of other Iranian filmmakers. It’s also his first since a ban on making movies, originally placed on him in 2010, was lifted. He has said that his films have always dealt with his immediate environment, so it was natural that, having spent “seven months in the very specific context of a prison”, the experiences of prisoners were bound to find a way into his cinema. On 2 December, he received a new prison sentence, this time of two years.

However, this film is quite different from the quirky metafictions Panahi has made surreptitiously in the past decade and a half, quasi-documentaries that focused on the restrictions of life in Iran. It’s a fully worked-out drama, almost an open threat to the regime, as it anticipates how, if the Islamic Republic were to fall, there would be both an accounting and a need for forgiveness in whatever version of Iran replaces it. Vahid is, you could say, conducting a truth and reconciliation commission of his own.

That burden doesn’t weigh the film down until the last act. It’s often remarkably funny. Save for Azizi, the actors are part time or amateur – especially good is Mariam Afshari as the photographer Shiva: her strong posture and disdain for the hijab are quite a statement in themselves – and the film has the texture of reality: a thriller that’s about crime and punishment with a seriousness far beyond the ludicrous confections served to us by the streamers. Despite low budgets and continued monitoring, Panahi has at last been able to make a movie on a scale to match such a release.

The final scene, in which Peg Leg is tied to a tree and luridly illuminated by the van’s lights, is overly theatrical perhaps. But It Was Just an Accident is terrific, nothing less than cinema as national conscience.

“It Was Just an Accident” is in cinemas on 5 December

[Further reading: Pillion is the film Fifty Shades failed to be]