Cinema: Jafar Panahi’s It was just an accident
Sometimes, a film is more than just a film. It is a matter of life and death.
Jafar Panahi’s latest film IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT, which won the top prize (Palme d’Or) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is such a film. It takes you on a wild ride through the streets of Tehran as a dark tale unfolds. Victims of a cruel tormenter, who have tried to rebuild normal lives for themselves, encounter this man in a different setting. He is now the one bound and shackled, the one in their power. How do they deal with him, how do they respond to the horrors that he had done to them? Is the answer revenge and retribution or is it mercy?
Jafar Panahi’s ‘It Was Just An Accident’ – The Trailer
This morality thriller is all the more riveting because Panahi is making these forbidden films in secrecy in defiance of a totalitarian Iranian government. He has been imprisoned twice before and continues to speak out and throw a light on the lives of Iranian citizens.
It was just an Accident is a powerful film which keeps you on the edge of your seat as tormented and tormenter try to find justice and revenge on streets and isolated deserts. Real, everyday life which has been built so carefully after their nightmare encounters seems to fall away and they are back in their imagination as victims of the sadistic jailhouse captor whom they never even saw during their imprisonment as they were always blindfolded. They only know Peg Leg from the nauseating sound his prosthetic leg makes, a terrifying sound which is seared into their very souls. Can they ever get closure by forgiving a crime which has consumed their lives? Or is bloody revenge the only way?
Knowing how this film came about, we can only marvel how Panahi has responded to the cruelties and torment from the powers that be. The notes on the film give some insightful truths into Panahi’s backstory:
“Suppression has become the mother of his inventiveness. Banned from filmmaking for 20 years in 2010, since then, for every roadblock the government has laid in his path, Panahi has forged a staggeringly creative solution. In 2011, while under house arrest, he made This Is Not a Film on an iPhone, smuggling the content out on a USB Stick. In 2013, he shot Closed Curtain at home behind covered windows. In 2015, he filmed Taxi using a dashcam on a taxicab he personally drove. His 2022 film No Bears, about a director in exile, was shot as he was actually in exile on the Iranian-Turkish border.”
With the acclaimed film’s recent Palme d’Or win at Cannes, Panahi has now completed the European festival triple crown, having won the top prize at all three major European film festivals – Venice, Berlin, and Cannes. He previously received the Golden Lion in Venice for The Circle and Berlin’s Golden Bear for Taxi, becoming only the fourth director to ever achieve this distinction.
““Everything you see in the film is not my personal experience but the experience of the Iranian people who have spent a half century in captivity,” he says. The film drops the audience directly, with a hypnotic accessibility, into a world seldom seen at the movies, a world of dissident artists, intellectuals, and activists who have learned to lead otherwise ordinary lives amid sudden, life-shattering shocks of incarceration, intimidation, and unconscionable torture. For many who have bucked the system, anxiety, hypervigilance, and the hedging of all life’s bets have become so routine as to be absurd, a quality deeply embedded in It Was Just an Accident.
The happy news is that Panahi’s audacity, in concert with new digital technologies, has been a major inspiration for an emergent wave of bold subversive filmmaking in Iran. More young writers and directors are tackling head-on the kind of raw, inflammatory social and political subject matter once veiled by allegory. This rush of uncorked expression is reshaping the culture and has led to a period of renewed creative fertility, with 70 underground Iranian films submitted for consideration to Cannes in 2024.”
And that alone shows the triumph and bravado power of creativity, resourcefulness and fearlessness as an answer to intimidation and torture.
It is possible to build a better world – if you have the heart and the courage.
Jafar Panahi and Martin Scorsese Talk about It was Just an Accident.
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