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When “It Was Just an Accident,” the new film by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, Panahi reacted in a way I’ve never seen from a winning director. As the audience at the Grand Théâtre Lumière applauded and stood up, Panahi, wearing sunglasses, remained in his seat and let out a whoop of joy. Then, with a satisfied smile, he folded his hands behind his head and leaned back, as if immersing himself in the moment. Eventually, he rose and walked to the stage, where Juliette Binoche, the competition jury president, and Cate Blanchett were waiting to present the award. No one seemed to be trying to diminish the significance of Panahi’s victory by rushing him. His long, agonizing, improbable journey to this stage deserved more than a moment’s reflection.
Panahi last visited Cannes in 2003, for the premiere of his fourth feature, Crimson Gold, a tense, dark drama about a pizza delivery boy in Tehran driven to desperate crime. The film received rave reviews and won the top prize at Cannes; it also offered a harsh assessment of the Islamic Republic and, unsurprisingly, was banned from showing in Iran. A similar fate befell Panahi’s previous film, The Circle, a scathing critique of the everyday mistreatment of Iranian women that won the top prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 2000. By the time he began filming his next movie, Offside, in 2005, Panahi was working in open defiance of the government. The gripping comedy about young women banned from attending a soccer match in Tehran was shot without ministry permission. After the film won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2006, it was banned in Iran, although it was widely shown on unlicensed DVD copies and became one of Panahi's most popular films.
In 2010, Iranian authorities arrested Panahi and charged him with anti-government propaganda; found guilty, he was sentenced to six years in prison and given a twenty-year ban on making films. None of the punishments ultimately worked. After a few months, the director was transferred to house arrest, and he continued to make films: This Is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2014), Taxi (2015), Three Faces (2019), and No Bears (2022) were all shot in clandestine conditions. This Is Not a Film was shot entirely in his home; Taxi was shot largely in a taxi. In the years since, these five films have been studied and appreciated not only as models of cinematic stealth and resourcefulness, but also as a series of wry, even bizarre self-portraits—triumphs of creative reflection under pressure. In most of these films, Panahi plays a director named Jafar Panahi, who is sometimes watchful and reserved, and at other times openly philosophical, questioning the circumstances of his imprisonment. When I encountered these films at festivals, I was always pleased and comforted to see their director on screen, since he, too, was barred from leaving Iran. It became common, as a symbolic gesture of solidarity, for festival organizers to leave a seat empty for Panahi with a sign bearing his name.
There wasn’t a single empty seat at Cannes this year. Panahi, no longer barred from traveling, attended the premiere of It Was Just an Accident a week ago and remained in town until the closing ceremony four days later. (He flew home to Tehran on Monday without incident, and was greeted at the airport by cheering fans.) His physical presence in front of a rapturous crowd at Cannes—not to mention winning arguably the most prestigious award in world cinema—was a stunning turnaround for a director who, just a few years ago, was languishing in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. He was sent there in 2022 after authorities decided that he should serve out his 2010 prison sentence after all. In February 2023, Panahi began a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment that many feared would end in his death. Instead, forty-eight hours later, he was released – and given freedom on his own brilliant, uncompromising terms, to make films again.
It Was Just an Accident is Panahi’s first film since his release, and to say that it feels truly liberated from the yoke of cinema seems both obvious and necessary: this is the work of an artist who, having been to hell and back, has clearly exhausted the proverbial “quirks.” Panahi, in particular, is not on screen, perhaps because it would be superfluous; his presence—and his experiences of detention, imprisonment, interrogation—are etched into every frame, and they lend the film an inexorable moral authority.
Sourse: newyorker.com
