Multi-awarded and internationally renowned auteur Jafar Panahi arrives at TIFF50 with his new masterpiece, ‘It Was Just An Accident’. The revenge thriller has been awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2025, adding to his filmography an impressive list of international film festival awards like the Golden Leopard in 1997 for ‘The Mirror’, the Golden Lion in 2000 for ‘The Circle’ and the Golden Bear in 2015 for ‘Taxi’. A dissident in his own homeland Iran for which he was jailed at various times and banned from making films, Panahi is quite rightly received with a TIFF Tribute Awards red carpet reception in Toronto.
‘It Was Just An Accident’ arrives at TIFF50 not only as Director Jafar Panahi’s vehicle for suspense but also as a constant reminder to those who are familiar with his films that persecution and human rights violation in regimes persist and authoritarianism continues to spread in other parts of the globe. In a speech at the gathering of other luminaries and fellow awardees, Panahi expresses his concern about scary signs he sees in places where we thought we’d never see. “In order for us to make a world in which we can all live comfortably, we are each responsible for our own countries.”
As France’s submission to the Academy Awards in 2026, ‘It Was Just An Accident’ is Panahi’s latest contribution to the larger purpose of cinema which is defiance at the continued hostility of totalitarianism against freedom of expression. Aside from all the accolades he received for his signature films, the auteur was also an honorary human rights awardee in 2012 with a Sakharov Prize, the same prize which was first awarded to Nelson Mandela in 1988.
Panahi remains steadfast and uncompromising with his vision of using cinema as an instrument of giving light to the dark and voice to the silenced corners of the world where tyranny reigns.
Emotionally charged with victims’ vindictiveness against a perceived agent of torture, ‘It Was Just An Accident’ encompasses a complex interplay of recounted pasts from both psychologically wounded characters and their victimizer. The story begins inside a car and for the next 24 hours a
happenstance will lead to a conundrum of shared scars of trauma and guilt.
Reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s ‘Death And The Maiden’, where the protagonist Paulina Escobar, a dissident and a victim of kidnapping, torture and rape, holds captive a guest at the house who she believes is responsible for the violence committed during her time in prison. The guest is put in a mock trial that she devises and demands that he confess his crime.
Panahi’s ‘It Was Just An Accident’ with all its political and cultural ramifications sets a tone that is more personal, enriched, and not watered down by fiction. One who is familiar with his account of lived experience cannot dissociate Panahi’s version of truth as shared by all the characters in the film. Being an actor himself in his other fims, he chose to exclude himself from the cast in this one but still, his presence is felt like a narrator whose voice speaks for all the victims of repression.
The film begins with a seemingly docile Eghbal, who accidentally kills a stray dog while driving at night with his pregnant wife and daughter. The car engine begins having trouble shortly after and luckily, Eghbal finds a good samaritan who offers him assistance at a workshop. Vahid, another worker at the shop, notices Eghbal’s limp and is repulsed by the familiar squeaky noise the prosthetic leg makes as he walks in. He then devises a plot to kidnap him. His gut tells him that Eghbal was one of his former torturers during the time he was incarcerated.
But one wonders if this is really the same guy who tortured him and others in prison. His cognizance and moral judgment tells him that retribution must take place while he has the power over Eghbal. He then approaches different individuals who, like himself, have been victims of torture and who might be able to positively identify the captive. He summons them like a kangaroo court inside his van with the captive’s fate lying in their hands.
Jafar Panahi’s personal experience as a blindfolded political detainee lends itself to writing the screenplay. Even on the set, he would consult other dissident friends who had spent more time than him in prison to countercheck whether scenes look real. The tense-filled environment and apprehension the cast and crew had to endure while shooting on location was very much part of the process.
The long drawn out agonizing interrogation on Eghbal’s crimes by his captors reaches its peak at an isolated clearing whereby confession of guilt through coercion eerily echo the authoritative measures of gaining full control of the captive’s fate. But the search of truth and justice linger on like a dark cloud filled with all the burden of one’s tragedy. Call it fate or just an accident, the victim’s opportuned moment to deal with his own unreconciled past does not extract himself from the deep seated emotion of retribution. Even if his conscience guides him to do the right thing by avoiding violence, his tortured past will always be trailing him like a ghost, or in this case, a peculiar sound of someone’s footstep.
After filming, Panahi’s co-writer has been sent back to prison. Art imitating life imitating art resonate unabashedly in soundboards of truth telling.
Censorship is the air artists breathe under the skies of Iran. Being able to showcase his latest film to international festivals as a recognizable name in cinema may expose him to much less danger compared to ordinary citizens in the streets of Tehran. As Panahi quips in many of his interviews, “I’m not doing anything more heroic as what other Iranians do.”
Reflecting on his earlier ordeal with authorities, having been in total isolation in a tiny cell and interrogated for several hours at a stretch, he sees the absurdity of repression against artists because it only gives them a springboard to open up possibilities. A whole new path emerges, with stored ideas and irrepressible vision to be shared on film. Everything good that comes out is dug deep from the darker recesses of the storyteller and maybe, with some luck, from happy accidents. ####