The audience bursts into laughter—sudden, unexpected—as Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) appears on screen, a box of pastries in hand. “The mother is doing well,” he announces to the group.
It is a startling moment. Absurd, in fact. The “mother” is the wife of Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), or ‘Peg Leg’—the group’s former torturer in an Iranian prison—now tied up in the back of their van as they try determining if it is indeed him. Blindfolded when imprisoned for acts such as protesting for workers’ rights, they can’t be sure. And yet, even as they debate his fate, including killing him, they set out to help his pregnant wife.
The mood shifts. There’s silence in the room as the film builds to its climax. Vahid finally confronts his torturer, who speaks of what the “state” means to him, before breaking down, and says: “I’m just like you.”
There’s this interplay between tragedy and absurdist comedy, the pain of state tyranny that unfolds alongside everyday reality, that lies at the heart of It Was Just an Accident, the latest by Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for two Oscars and four Golden Globes this year.
The film was recently screened in New Delhi at the Habitat International Film Festival (HIFF).
A horror-farce
The film opens with Eghbal driving through the dark with his pregnant wife and young daughter when something suddenly hits the car—a dog. “It was just an accident,” his wife shrugs.
The “accident,” however, leaves the car damaged, forcing Eghbal to stop at a garage. The garage belongs to Vahid, who recognises the clomping of Eghbal’s prosthetic leg—the only thing he could identify his torturer by, having been blindfolded during his imprisonment.
What follows is a surge of rage and a chain of events. Vahid kidnaps Eghbal and drives him out to the desert, attempting to bury him alive, until Eghbal insists he has the wrong man.
Vahid hesitates. Blindfolded during his torture, he cannot be certain.
He puts Eghbal back in a coffin-like box in the back of his van and sets off to find others who might identify him—people who, like him, suffered at the hands of the state. Among them are Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a wedding photographer; Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and her groom Ali (Majid Panahi), whose pictures she is taking; and the hot-headed Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr).
What unfolds is a shockingly funny revenge thriller, one that takes the group to various places and propels them through a series of absurd encounters. At one point, Vahid is forced to bribe policemen who casually produce a card reader when he says he isn’t carrying cash. It’s a pointed gag on the everyday corruption that thrives in a society squeezed between international sanctions and state repression.
Such moments puncture the film’s darkness. The laughter they provoke never trivialises the violence, but further sharpens the critique.
At its core, the film turns the tables between the oppressed and the oppressor, imagining what remains when power slips from the latter’s hands. In doing so, it becomes a quiet but unmistakable indictment of authoritarian regimes.
And Panahi, himself imprisoned twice, including at Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison known to hold political prisoners, is unhinged in his frankness in depicting life under state control. It’s as if he’s rage-baiting the regime itself.
The result is a masterclass in contemporary cinema—brazen, fearless, and made at a cost its maker knows all too well.
A filmmaker dissents
While abroad and busy in awards circuit, Panahi was handed another prison sentence late last year on charges of propaganda against the system. The dissident filmmaker has said he will return to Iran after the Oscars, despite the risk of arrest, which would mark his third prison term.
Panahi began his career in the late 1990s with films such as The Mirror (1997) and The Circle (2000), the latter—on the lives of women under social restrictions—winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
In 2010, he was arrested on charges of making anti-government propaganda, and was barred from leaving Iran or making films. He defied the latter with remarkable ingenuity, continuing to shoot in secret, including on his phone. His 2011 documentary This Is Not a Film was famously shot partly on an iPhone and smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive hidden inside a cake. In Taxi (2015), he turned a car into a moving set.
He was arrested again in 2022 for protesting the detention of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, and was lodged in Evin Prison. He was released after seven months following a hunger strike.
His latest, It Was Just an Accident, was also shot in secrecy, not because of an explicit ban, but out of his refusal to submit to state censorship.
His gestures, almost mischief against the Iranian regime, reveal something bigger about the larger Iranian cinema. Acclaimed worldwide, it has been shaped by the political upheavals, state repression but also its brilliant makers, who have turned to out-of-the-box innovation creating cinematic brilliance while not being bogged down in front of power.
Cinema reinvents
Cinema under the Shah in Iran was largely dominated by melodrama and commercial thrillers, drawing heavily from Bollywood and Hollywood. Much of it, however, failed to portray, authentically, the lived reality of Iranian society.
That began to shift in the 1960s with films like The Cow (1969) by Dariush Mehrjui, which offered an unflinching look at rural life. Around the same time, Sohrab Shahid-Saless’s Still Life (1974) captured the quiet loneliness of ordinary existence. A new cinematic language, hence, took shape, one marked by long takes, emotional restraint and minimal dialogues.
The Iranian Revolution transformed the country, ushering in an era of state control and moral policing. Yet, rather than submit, many filmmakers responded with subtle defiance, using cinema to navigate, as the artform itself continued to take shape.
This era saw the emergence of the likes of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Asghar Farhadi, and Jafar Panahi, who have made a mark internationally.
At a time when Iran is often seen through the global headlines of war and conflict, its cinema offers a counterpoint, an art form that refused to be silenced and evolved into an inventive and quietly radical traditions in global filmmaking.