Jafar Panahi on Art After Imprisonment

In 2010, Jafar Panahi was arrested by Iranian authorities and banned for 20 years from making films or leaving his home country. Nevertheless, he continued defiantly and clandestinely directing new work. Across five features, he turned the camera on himself, treating his personal situation as source material while reflecting on his country’s oppressive regime more broadly. Panahi was arrested again in 2022, shortly after completing his film No Bears; he was released from prison in early 2023 after going on a hunger strike, with his ban lifted without explanation.

Panahi premiered his newest film, It Was Just an Accident (2025), at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where he was awarded the Palme d’Or. The darkly comedic thriller follows the recently released political prisoner Vahid, who believes he has encountered the sadistic intelligence officer and torturer Eghbal in public and proceeds to kidnap him. Because Vahid does not know for certain that this is the same man who tortured him – he only recognizes the sound of the man’s artificial leg, since he was always blindfolded during their encounters – he enlists the help of others who had also been imprisoned and abused by Eghbal, and together they decide what to do with their captive. The film combines suspense with farce to engage with challenging questions around violence and retribution.

Panahi and I spoke during his recent trip to New York, where It Was Just an Accident screened as part of the New York Film Festival. Sheida Dayani facilitated our conversation as an interpreter.

Marko Gluhaich You have said that before you were banned from filmmaking, your work described Iranian society as you saw it out on the streets, and that after the ban, your films could only describe your own situation, removed from that society. It Was Just an Accident seems to mark yet another shift, towards films that are at once outward-facing – you yourself are not a character in this film – and self-reflective: you’ve spoken of its origins in your own experience. How does this film reflect your changing relationship to Iranian society?

Jafar Panahi I’d been sentenced to a 20-year ban from making films, a 20-year ban from doing interviews and was banned from leaving Iran, so anything that I saw became about myself and cinema.

The films This Is Not a Film [2011] and Closed Curtain [2013] are a lot more personal and just about me. Taxi [2015, a docufiction in which Panahi drives a cab around Tehran] was a little broader, in that different people come into the cab and discuss their beliefs. 3 Faces [2018] traces three different generations in cinema. No Bears goes even broader and talks about superstition. So, in the end, society is always there.

For those films, made while I was banned, it was about how to depict myself and tell my story in terms of how I related to society, or to any of these topics. But in It Was Just an Accident, now that my sentences have been lifted, it was as if I went from being in front of the camera to where I was before – behind the camera. I used both my own experiences and the experiences of my fellow prisoners and came up with this film.

MG Rather than relaying one person’s experience of imprisonment and torture, It Was Just an Accident depicts those of a group. What inspired you to write about these experiences across multiple individuals?

JP When you go to prison, you meet different people. You listen to their stories. It doesn’t matter where they come from. And now, when you want to make a film, you make a film about all of them, because no one was higher or lower, in the sense that they were prisoners.

You have a simple worker like Vahid; a gentleman who was at some point a university professor and shows up in the bookshop as if he’s more mature than the rest of the characters and can see the future better; that violent hothead Hamid; the two non-violent journalists, the bride and Shiva; and Ali, the neutral character, who in Persian is called the ‘grey zone of society’, which means the person who has no reaction to the situation and whose role in the plot is purely accidental – he’s just been dragged into it by someone else. They all had to come together for us to have an impartial view from the outside, even of the interrogator.

MG The group dynamics also made me think of those among the girls who tried to sneak into a football match in Offside [2006], and how groups can engender a sort of comedy of errors. It Was Just an Accident, while handling a variety of responses to the trauma of imprisonment and torture, is a deeply funny, almost slapstick film. What draws you to comedy as a convention?

JP Whether you want it or not, humour finds its way even into difficult situations, and [in film] it actually helps the realism of the work to come out. Some of it is not intentional – it just finds its way in. But some of it is in our hands, and we decide how far to go with the humour and in what places.

I was actually trying to make it easy for the audience to follow the plot of the film up to the end, because in the last sequence [in which Vahid ties Eghbal to a tree and he and Shiva speak about what they might do to their captive], I wanted to strike the audience so hard that when they leave the cinema, they won’t be able to stop thinking about the film.

MG You brought human rights defender Mehdi Mahmoudian to the set to speak to the actors ahead of that climactic scene, where Eghbal is confronted by Vahid and Shiva. Why was it important that Mahmoudian speak to the cast?

JP The sequence with the tree is really important. I knew perhaps all the groups that were there in prison, but I never met the interrogators – I only heard their voices. But Mehdi spent ten years of his life in jail and therefore knows and understands them better than I do. When I saw that the shot [a close-up on Eghbal throughout the entire scene] wasn’t coming together, I asked Mehdi to come to the set and share what he knew with the actors.

He helped us bring the acting together, drawing on what he had heard from the interrogators in prison – how he analyzed their personalities, where he thought Eghbal might raise his voice, where he might feel humiliated, where he would soften and where he would reveal his understanding of power.

But these were only foundations for the actor playing Eghbal [Ebrahim Azizi]. Even with all that guidance, the actor has to show his art. If you don’t have a good actor who can bring out the character, the entire film can be lost – especially in a 13-and-a-half-minute medium shot. The actor is blindfolded. His hands are tied, and he is bound to a tree – he has almost no room to move. So his performance, all his expression, has to be seen in his face. It is extremely difficult to do successfully. You don’t have to be a Hollywood superstar to show what a strong actor you are. Even though he is the supporting actor, his performance is so powerful that I believe he saved the film.

_{Main image: Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident, 2025, film still. Courtesy: Neon}