'It Was Just an Accident' is a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage

"When the Iranian director Jafar Panahi showed up at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it struck some of us as something close to a miracle. For most of the past 15 years, since he was arrested in 2010 and charged with making anti-government propaganda, Panahi had been forbidden to travel outside Iran. He'd also been banned from making movies, though he got around that restriction with great ingenuity and continued to shoot films in secret."

"But then, in 2022, Panahi was arrested again and imprisoned. When he announced, seven months later, that he was beginning a hunger strike, many of us feared it would end with his death. Instead, he was released after two days and has been free to travel ever since. It's an astonishing real-life story, one that, for tension and peril, may well rival the one that Panahi tells in his new film, It Was Just an Accident."

"This remarkable movie, which ended up winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, feels like a liberated work in every sense. In his recent, more under-the-radar films, like 3 Faces or No Bears, Panahi sometimes seemed to be speaking in code, or through layers of parable. But there's nothing cryptic or ruminative about It Was Just an Accident. It's a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage, a gripping and often shockingly funny revenge thriller."

Jafar Panahi endured years of arrest, travel bans, and a filmmaking prohibition yet continued to shoot films clandestinely. Arrested again in 2022, he began a hunger strike and was released after two days, then traveled to Cannes. His film It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d'Or. The movie channels anti-authoritarian rage into a darkly comic, gripping revenge thriller informed by stories of people encountered in prison. The plot follows Vahid, an auto mechanic who believes a prosthetic-legged customer is the torturer known as Peg Leg, producing tense moral ambiguity and shocking violence.

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