When Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” debuted at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, it was the culmination of a brutal journey. The Iranian filmmaker has been banned from filmmaking (though it seldom stopped him) and imprisoned multiple times for opposing his home country’s government, most recently in 2022, when he had to rely on others to read messages on his behalf at global film festivals that screened his film “No Bears.”
He was eventually released following a hunger strike in February 2023, and returned to work on a blistering moral dilemma film about an Iranian man who kidnaps the man who once tortured him in prison and, along with the man’s other victims, is forced to make a decision about whether or not to kill him.
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“It Was Just an Accident” premiered to rave reviews and a Palme d’Or victory at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, with critics praising Panahi’s deeply personal connection to the material and the nuanced moral dilemma that the film portrays.
“From the plot description alone, it’s obvious that “It Was Just an Accident” finds Panahi working in a very different register than he had to while ‘banned’ from making films — a period that saw his long-standing penchant for metafiction become considerably more pronounced, as he was forced to make himself the subject of iPhone/camcorder masterpieces like ‘This Is Not a Film,’” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in his Cannes review. “This one still had to be shot in secret in order to skirt government approval, but it takes great pleasure in replacing the self-reflexivity of Panahi’s illegal work with a slightly more formal sense of composition, even if it remains impossible to separate the final product from the personal experience that informed it.”
“It Was Just an Accident” is written and directed by Jafar Panahi. The film stars Vahid Mobasseri, Maryam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, Georges Hashemzadeh, Delmaz Najafi, Afssaneh Najmabadi.
Neon will release “It Was Just An Accident” in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 15, with a national rollout to follow. Watch the trailer below.
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