Jafar Panahi’s latest film, It Was Just an Accident (2025), marks his return to the politically driven narratives of The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006), films he made before the Tehran Islamic Revolutionary Court banned him from filmmaking for twenty years in 2010.
In each of the five documentary-like films he had made since the start of this sentence – This is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), Taxi (2015),3 Faces (2018), and No Bears (2022) – Panahi appeared onscreen as himself. Produced with hidden cameras and in locations invisible to the Islamist regime, these films were Panahi’s only outlet to be frank about the Iranian government, as he was not allowed to speak to the press during the ban. But Panahi is never onscreen in It Was Just an Accident. After being released from prison in February 2023 following a two-day hunger strike to protest his 2022 detention, Panahi returned to his narrative roots with a moral drama about a group of political dissidents brought together by the shared nightmare of their past imprisonment. Though it’s clear that Panahi imbued It Was Just an Accident’s screenplay with his lived experience, his career-long solidarity with ordinary people’s survival and endurance under Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, carries over into this film.
In It Was Just an Accident, car mechanic Vahid stumbles upon a ghost from his past when a man named Rashid Shahvari pulls into his shop to have his car fixed late at night. Once Vahid hears Rashid’s prosthetic leg squeak, he has a feeling that this man must be Eghbal, his interrogator and torturer during his political imprisonment. Vahid takes the man prisoner in the back of his car. Yet he’s racked by doubt, as he had never seen Eghbal’s face while he was incarcerated; he only knew the sound of his prosthetic leg. Desperate for certainty before his decisive act of vengeance, Vahid delves into a network of former political prisoners to find out whether Rashid truly is Eghbal. Humor, tension, and scares ensue in this revenge thriller. The characters use all five senses to explore human connection amid Iran’s oppressive climate. Panahi’s neorealist sensibilities convey to the audience that the memories of the sights and sounds we absorb shape one’s perspective over time.
Despite the near-universal praise for It Was Just an Accident – the film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, its world premiere, and was named France’s submission for the Oscars, while Panahi won Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle and is nominated for Best International Film and Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards – Panahi has faced issues with national bureaucratic bodies. Last October’s U.S. government shutdown delayed his visa, initially preventing him from appearing at the 2025 Mill Valley and New York Film Festivals (the latter added a new screening of It Was Just an Accident with his attendance and rescheduled his historic conversation with Martin Scorsese). On December 1, the day Panahi won three awards at the Gotham Film Awards, the Tehran Islamic Revolutionary Court sentenced him in absentia to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban for “propaganda activities” that oppose the regime. Panahi and his attorneys launched an appeal on January 4. No matter what is imposed on Panahi, he has found and will continue to find a way to critique and challenge the authoritarian state whose civilians are currently rebelling against it.
Strange Matters caught up with Panahi via Zoom during his awards campaign, between the New York Film Critics Circle and Golden Globe Awards ceremonies. Through interpreter Sheida Dayani, he spoke to us about his shift back behind the camera, the recurring presence of roads in his work, and the challenges of subtitling films for foreign audiences.
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INTERVIEWER
It Was Just an Accident is more reminiscent of your earlier films, particularly your not being on camera as in your recent films No Bears and Taxi. What inspired you to go behind the camera this time around?
PANAHI
I really don’t want to be in front of the camera myself, but sometimes the circumstances require us to be in front of the camera. They [the Islamic Revolutionary Court] had given me a very heavy sentence that banned me from making films for twenty years, and that had brought a big shock to me. It had psychologically impacted me to the point that anything I looked at I could only see my profession and myself. I was thinking, what is it that I can do if I don’t make films. And it all became about myself and cinema. So what can I do if I’m not making films? I could be a cab driver. But then even that way, I’m still going to hide a camera and make the stories of my passengers. So no matter what I thought, it was me and my job. And then, when they told me that the sentence had been lifted, I went back to my original status: meaning behind the camera. And that was the difference between the two. It was a psychological effect that continued for that period.
INTERVIEWER
Your films seem to have an obsession with long drives off in the dark through empty spaces and in-between spaces. This seems something have in common with your mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, and also the likes of David Lynch and the directors of American classic westerns. Does this kind of scene evoke a particular feeling for you? Is it a conscious choice to film so many long drives, or is it simply a reflection of the day-to-day life of many Iranian people?
PANAHI
No, it’s all based on content. For instance, in this recent film, the box that this guy was confined in: what could it have been carried in? They couldn’t carry him on their shoulders in that box. But then of course, different audiences can have different interpretations. Can you even point to a film in which cars don’t exist? But to me, the function of it was just necessitated by the plot. But of course, you can have your own interpretation.
INTERVIEWER
What did the Iranian dissident movement look like at the time of filming It Was Just an Accident?
PANAHI
Our society is always pregnant with certain events. Especially with the Women, Life, Freedom movement and the union between people, we could think that it’s going to start at some point again. Before the Twelve-Day War, there were many protests, especially truck drivers, going very advanced. And it was just showcasing how angry and dissatisfied people were. But of course, with the war, the regime found an opportunity to crush all movements. Until six months after, when you see these days, people are still on the street.
INTERVIEWER
My Iranian friend told me that there are nuances of meaning in It Was Just an Accident’s climax that didn’t come through in the English translation. What was translated as “say ‘sorry,’” / “I’m sorry” – it’s really more like “say you ate shit.” / “I ate shit.” For me, this seemed to change the inflection of that scene where, if anything, the protagonist comes off as too forgiving in the English translation. Would you agree with this? And do you think there are other cultural and linguistic nuances in the film that might not come through for English-speaking audiences?
PANAHI
This is obviously a problem with subtitled films. It’s not just about this film. For instance, with that expression that the interrogator says, “I ate shit,” they really searched to find the right expression, and eventually they got to what they wrote. I know that there are things that are lost in subtitles, but there is no other way. And if it is retranslated, I’m sure there will be other issues with the new translation.
INTERVIEWER
How often do you collaborate with the translators in the subtitling process?
PANAHI
Because the distributor of my previous films also spoke Persian and lived in France, she really worked hard on it herself. I don’t know, maybe they came out better. But with this film, because she passed away, she wasn’t present. And because I’m not very familiar with English, I cannot really intervene. I can only tell them what my senses and what my feelings are. For instance, we have a watering can that we take to the bathroom with us to wash our bodies. And I really don’t know how to translate that. Because this does not exist in American culture, they find the closest thing to it. Yet, I don’t know if it’s going to carry the meaning. When Shiva and Hamid have a fight and Hamid leaves, the sentence that Shiva says is heard very intensely by patriotic men. I think she said something like “you disgust me.” This is because the cultural differences might be lost. I don’t know if it comes out as heavily here. These issues all exist. Some of it is cultural. Some of it has to do with the subtitles. There is not much you can do.
INTERVIEWER
That also applies to humor as well; the differences between what Iranians and Americans find funny.
PANAHI
Yes. And again, it’s a cultural issue. There are other places that we cannot control. People are laughing and we don’t know why. One of them is the sequence of the hospital. We see that when the labor brings the family of that guy into the hospital, everyone laughs. I was asking why everyone’s laughing, and they told me it’s funny because he had come to kill the guy, and now they’re taking his family to the hospital. I’m sure that if you show this film in Iran, no one will laugh at that sequence because it’s a humanistic exchange, even if it’s with your enemy.
INTERVIEWER
Your work seems often to focus on conflicts between the political and the humanistic. How do you conceptualize the interplay between these domains?
PANAHI
Because they’re socially engaged films. We make social films with the subject of politics. There are big differences between political and social films. I have to say again that political films have a definition because I think political films are partisan films. From the beginning, they make it clear what’s good and what’s bad. Meaning, anyone who agrees with my party is in the good group, and anyone who doesn’t agree is not in that. But in social films, we don’t have purely good or purely bad characters. And those films don’t portray anyone in an evil fashion. And they allow everyone to speak what they have to say. Humans are not at fault. It’s the circumstances that are at fault. Perhaps if any of these characters switched places with the interrogator, they would have also had the same reaction. And that’s why towards the end of the film, we have a thirteen-minute shot that’s just focused on the interrogator. We wanted the audience to focus on this one character and get to learn and know about his world. But that’s not how it works in political films, because political films have portrayed this character in an evil fashion. They will never allow him to defend himself. Therefore I make social films with political subjects. Perhaps later on, I could be making a social film about war. It’s not a war movie. It’s a social film with the subject of war. I don’t want you to say that it’s a war movie. ~
