The sole child in Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident knows right from wrong. In the film’s first scene, a young girl is introduced bopping up and down in the backseat of a car, to the beat of a repetitive dance number all but designed to annoy tired moms and dads everywhere. Her father (Ebrahim Azizi) tries to turn down the music, but after some pleading, and a look from Mom, it goes back to full volume. Suddenly, he hits something in the road that makes a yelping noise upon impact. He gets out of the car to carefully inspect the damage, and discovers it’s a street dog.
When the father gets back in the car, the child no longer wants to hear any music. “You killed it,” she solemnly mutters. Her mother patiently offers a few excuses to appease her. The road isn’t adequately lit, so wild animals unfortunately become roadkill all the time. In fact, it was God’s will that the dog died the way he did. It was just an accident. But the kid isn’t having it. God has nothing to do with it, she insists. Her father killed a dog in the road and that’s all there is to it.
Children are frequent figures of perceptive innocence in Iranian cinema. Since “children’s films” are most likely to avoid censorship from Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, post-revolution filmmakers have centered many short and feature-length projects on young kids navigating an adult world, a canny approach to depicting contemporary Iranian society in all of its beautiful and ugly shades. Kids perceive problems far beyond their social station anyway, so what better way to gesture toward the social inequities the government would prefer artists ignore than by capturing them through a child’s eyes?
Panahi featured children as protagonists in his first two films, but his subsequent work incorporates them in the margins of a strictly adult milieu, where murky conflicts and governmental repression run amok. It Was Just an Accident, the director’s first film as a “free man” following the Iranian Supreme Court’s recent invalidation of his circa-2010 20-year filmmaking and travel ban, portrays a cross-section of adults mired in violence. When the dad behind the wheel pulls over to a nearby garage to inspect his damaged engine, he’s spotted by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a former political prisoner who believes him to be “Eghbal” (or “Peg Leg” in English, named after his artificial limb), an intelligence officer whose torture methods were so aggressive it caused Vahid’s permanent kidney damage. With a determined glint in his eye, Vahid trails the family man to his home and kidnaps him on the street the very next day, with the goal of burying him alive in the desert.
But just as Vahid pours dirt over his blindfolded captive, he is troubled by doubts. Since he never actually laid eyes on Eghbal in prison, and only identified him by the squeak of his fake leg, he considers his hostage’s pleas of innocence. This uncertainty propels him to drive his white van across Tehran to confirm his suspicions with other ex-prisoners. Eventually, the van fills up with photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari); bride and groom Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and Ali (Majid Panahi), still in a wedding dress and suit, respectively; and Shiva’s hotspur ex-boyfriend Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), all of whom have been impacted by Eghbal’s abuse in one form or another, as they drive around the city weighing what to do with their could-be torturer.
It Was Just an Accident never shortchanges the severity of Vahid’s scheme—a possibly innocent man spends most of the film bound and gagged in a crate—but it also crucially emphasizes the inherent absurdity of enacting such a plot while maneuvering through a casually corrupt urban environment. Comedy, whether derived from the litany of bribes required to move through Tehran unfettered, or the negotiation of competing agendas within the film’s fractious makeshift group, greatly contributes to the film’s dynamic, unbridled sensibility. Over the past 15 years, Panahi’s work, though always essential, was restricted and self-referential by design, dramatizing the director’s own internment. It Was Just an Accident demonstrates an obvious, potent takeaway: Freedom of movement, literally and psychologically, can facilitate creative renewal.
Panahi’s filmography can be retroactively cleaved into pre- and post-conviction phases. His first five films, released between 1995 and 2006, are a series of near-perfect realist urban portraits starring non-professional actors moving through modern-day Tehran. The White Balloon (1995) and The Mirror (1997) depict both the city’s reliable generosity and offhanded menace through the eyes of young children away from their guardians’ guiding hand. With his third film, however, Panahi would start to run afoul of his government as his work began to target the regime. The Circle (2000) explicitly addresses the unjust treatment of women in Iran through a panoramic portrait of prisoners, mothers, and workers who face the brunt of a harsh patriarchal system. Meanwhile, Crimson Gold (2003) uses the travails of an impoverished pizza delivery man to explore the unaddressed PTSD amongst veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, and the country’s increasingly stark economic disparities amongst social classes.
Offside (2006), which follows an ensemble of teenage girls detained for trying to sneak into the Azadi Stadium disguised as boys to watch a qualifying World Cup match, garnered Panahi his then-largest profile and the most controversy within Iran. Using a compact digital video camera to capture footage during the actual game, Panahi evaded the demands of the Ministry of Guidance, who wouldn’t give him official permission to film unless he re-edited his two previous films. Like The Circle and Crimson Gold, Offside was banned from being exhibited in Iran, prompting bootlegs of the film to spread across the country like wildfire, and a harsher international spotlight on the country’s sex segregation.
Though he has shot all of his post-’90s work without approval from the Ministry, Panahi’s status as a dissident filmmaker became official in 2010, when the Iranian government levied a 20-year ban on filmmaking or travel, along with a six-year prison sentence, ostensibly because he was planning to make a film set against the backdrop of the Green Movement protests following the 2009 reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Panahi’s wife, Tahereh Saeedi, strongly denied her husband was making a film about the regime. He spent nearly three months in Evin Prison, at least some of the time in the infamous section 209 operated by the Ministry of Intelligence, before he was released on bail awaiting trial. Panahi was convicted in December 2010, and his appeal was denied nearly a year later. Meanwhile, the global film community, multiple foreign culture ministers, and human rights organizations widely condemned Panahi’s sentence. The festival juries of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and the 2011 Berlinale, at which Panahi was supposed to appear, left one chair empty to symbolize his absence.
It Was Just an Accident marks Panahi’s return to unbound urban filmmaking, but until 2023, he was under a loosely defined house arrest, meaning that he could travel freely within Iran but couldn’t be seen filming on the street. Thus, his next five films were all directed in clandestine fashion, initially indoors and then eventually outside, and feature Panahi playing a lightly fictionalized version of himself on screen. This Is Not a Film (2011), famously smuggled out of the country on a USB drive—though not in a cake, as initially reported—follows the director in his own home as he awaits news of his appeal, reflecting upon his career and describing the film he originally wanted to make prior to his legal challenges. A complex chamber piece, Closed Curtain (2013) dramatizes Panahi’s melancholy and suicidal ideation within his beachfront villa. Taxi (2015) presents the filmmaker in a more jovial mode as he turns his car into a mobile filmmaking unit, while staging scenes between him and the various strangers he picks up in Tehran. His following two films, 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022), also feature Panahi on the road, this time traveling to rural villages in northwest Iran where he engages with larger groups of people under semi-manufactured circumstances.
The post-conviction docufictions explicitly foreground Panahi’s arrest and acknowledge his status as both underground celebrity and enemy of the state. It’s downright funny how often the films include scenes of Iranian strangers marveling in awe upon meeting him. Over the previous 15 years, these compelling, though muted self-portraits not only chronicled the rapid development of digital technology, with Panahi taking advantage of every portable, economically viable tool at his disposal to evade the authorities, from crummy video and early-model iPhones to modern digital cameras. They also represent nothing less than confirmation of the director’s survival. The films became lifelines for Panahi, as well as his global band of supporters.
From the very first sequence in It Was Just an Accident—a masterful static frontal shot of a car that effortlessly transitions into a circular dolly around the vehicle, before returning to the head-on perspective—you can feel Panahi embrace an amplified aesthetic, the formal equivalent of relaxing one’s shoulders while breathing a sigh of relief. With his legal case dismissed following a seven-month prison stay after Iranian authorities baselessly tried to reactivate his previously suspended sentence, culminating in a 48-hour hunger strike, Panahi can now direct “freely,” i.e., still without official permission from the Ministry, which demands rigorous script approval, but nevertheless with considerably more autonomy. It Was Just an Accident sports myriad locations, many unrestrained camera angles and speedier editing rhythm, and casually deployed visual punchlines, all of which feel like the product of a director who has been finally allowed outside of his own head.
Obviously, It Was Just an Accident is as personal as the body of work from Panahi’s post-conviction period. The Iranian social and political context enlivens a premise broadly swiped from Ariel Dorfman’s 1990 play Death and the Maiden, which also follows a former political prisoner seeking retribution against a captor. While Dorfman used his drama to reflect upon the psychological wounds left behind from life under Pinochet’s authoritarian rule, Panahi uses the narrative conceit to process his multiple stints in prison, where he was subjected to abuse and harassment. “All these characters that you see in this film were inspired by conversations that I had, stories that they told me about, the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government with prisoners, violence that has been ongoing for more than four decades now,” Panahi said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, his first in 15 years.
The film’s stretches of farcical humor involving car trouble and an ever-wandering authoritarian gaze make palatable a mournful examination of vengeance as a viable means of justice. Vahid’s intent to kill Eghbal initially comes into conflict with his own doubt, but his uncertainty expands upon meeting his fellow compatriots. Everyone trades horrific stories of prison brutality—Vahid urinating himself following a mock execution, Goli being threatened with rape so she won’t be allowed into heaven—but the palpable anger coursing through the five-person cadre competes with a moral imperative not to inflict further bloodshed, to channel dissent into more productive areas. Notice Shiva and Goli’s choice to forgo hijabs, for example, a protest following the spread of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Righteous fury isn’t equivalent to going blood simple.
Except Hamid, who repeatedly demands the group kill Eghbal, even offering to take the brutal reprisal into his own hands so the rest can remain non-violent do-gooders. The actor’s splenetic rage superficially makes the character seem like the film’s most unreliable—he’s introduced aggressively pushing Shiva to the ground in public; his one-track mind borders on mania—but Panahi ensures that his unwavering conviction about giving back what was leveraged against him carries genuine weight. As much as It Was Just an Accident features scenes of spirited debate, it isn’t a morality play with a clear lesson to impart. Panahi doesn’t definitively argue that violence begets violence, or that revenge is never a straight line. Hamid’s insistence that oppression thrives upon good people turning the other cheek is hardly an extremist viewpoint given the state of the world.
It Was Just an Accident’s thematic foundation can’t easily be abstracted onto other regional concerns. It’s an Iranian film first and foremost, and part of its specific, animating wrath depends on the disquieting reality that the regime’s worst actors often live side by side with their victims. But as an American living under an increasingly authoritarian administration, and one who has spent his adult life contending with the cognitive dissonance of existing in a country that professes peace and freedom while actively undermining those values, It Was Just an Accident struck a chord. Until recently, I’ve always thought of myself as an aspiring “naysayer and hatchetman in the fight against violence,” to quote Albert from Twin Peaks, but lately I’ve gone to sleep at night dreaming of brutality and humiliation being inflicted upon those who themselves are administering such unchecked pain. Though I’m neither comfortable nor happy with how regularly I fantasize about such retribution, I also haven’t been able to stop. At what point does kindness qualify as a genuine weakness in a progressively hostile world?
Panahi presents a dialectic in two of It Was Just an Accident’s final sequences that touch on my admittedly embarrassing emotions. The first involves the return of Eghbal’s daughter, who calls his phone, which Vahid neglected to turn off, in hysterics because her pregnant mother has fainted. The group weighs the possibility of a regime trap, but proceeds to heed the child’s call and takes her and Eghbal’s wife to the hospital, where she safely gives birth to a boy. The compassionate act toward the family of a war criminal doesn’t go undebated—Hamid sneers that Eghbal’s son will grow up to be worse than his father—but the period of relative tranquility and unity transitions into a savage scene of Vahid and Shiva taking Eghbal to a remote location to extract a confession. The lengthy static shot of a blindfolded Eghbal tied to a tree, lit by the van’s red headlights, spouting snide invocations of faith and martyrdom in between pleas for his life, while the duo aggressively berate him, is a chilling, unshakeable high point in Panahi’s career. Closure isn’t achieved, catharsis can’t be attained, and life in all of its haunting incompleteness continues unabated.
Throughout his career, conservative Iranian critics have accused Panahi’s films of siyāhnamā'ī, or promoting an exaggeratedly dark image of the country to serve Western interests. While he refuses to turn a blind eye to the country’s imperfections, and still professionally operates outside of the regime’s authority, it’s worth noting that 15 years of state-sanctioned censorship and multiple prison sentences haven’t deterred the director from remaining in his homeland. In that same Hollywood Reporter interview, Panahi insists that he’s “completely incapable of adjusting to another society other than my own,” and that he’s “not able to survive and adapt to a new environment.” His resolute belief in his own country and its people recur throughout It Was Just an Accident, like a shot of strangers helping to push a stalled van in the road, or the affable attitude figures like a bookseller and a pharmacist engender among the community. The film’s most potent image features Vahid watching Eghbal’s daughter gladly bite into a sandwich he bought for her, hours after he was burying her father alive. Panahi knows better than anyone that the truth is riddled with contradictions.
