Jafar Panahi, arguably the most internationally recognized Iranian filmmaker working today, returns with It Was Just an Accident, which received the Palme d'Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. This dark comedy, filmed clandestinely and featuring a cast of both professional and non-professional actors, examines the moral and social consequences of confronting collaborators once a repressive regime has fallen.
Panahi’s filmmaking has long been defined by constraint, legal, political, and spatial. His earlier works, from The White Balloon to Offside, employed the grammar of realism to explore questions of access, agency, and justice through seemingly straightforward stories.
Following his 2010 arrest and sentencing, which prohibited him from directing, writing, or leaving the country, his cinema became increasingly introspective. This Is Not a Film, shot almost entirely within the confines of his Tehran apartment, served as both a protest and an act of artistic persistence. Taxi Tehran extended the physical space but retained a delineation between filmmaker and state, with Panahi assuming the roles of driver, filmmaker, and observer in the charged setting of the city.
With No Bears, Panahi further blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality, constructing a metafictional narrative that explored surveillance, authorship, and complicity. The film was completed shortly before his second arrest in 2022. During the seven months he spent in prison, he was held alongside political dissidents, laborers, and individuals imprisoned under ambiguous or incidental circumstances. It Was Just an Accident emerges directly from that experience.
It Was Just an Accident opens unassumingly, in line with its title’s literal meaning. During a nighttime drive, Eghbal (Ebrahim Aziz) and his family strike a dog on a rural road. His daughter (Delmaz Najafi) and pregnant wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) are shaken, but Eghbal calmly assesses the situation, offering quiet reassurance to his daughter.
The collision leaves the car damaged, prompting a stop at a nearby repair shop. In the repair shops works Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who hides the second he sees Eghbal. His agitation intensifies to the point of staling Eghbal the next day and carrying out a kidnapping in broad daylight.
From this point, the film unfolds as a kind of inner-city road movie, with Vahid driving through Tehran while Eghbal remains hidden in the back of his van. Along the way, Vahid visits former political prisoners, like himself, who once endured torture under the regime. His motivation becomes clear: he is almost sure that Eghbal is the very man who tortured him during his imprisonment.
The abuse left lasting physical and psychological scars, and Vahid is determined to exact retribution by burying Eghbal alive. Yet a sliver of doubt remains. He is not entirely certain that the man in his van is, in fact, the same Eghbal. To confirm his identity, Vahid consults others who also claim to have been tortured by Eghbal, seeking reassurance before he acts.
Despite its premise, Vahid’s search for confirmation gradually evolves into a darkly comic odyssey that merges elements of absurdist comedy with a revenge thriller. As he encounters more individuals eager to confront their own former torturer, so long as his identity is certain, the van fills with a cross-section of people from varied backgrounds, all connected by the shared trauma of having been brutalized by agents of the former regime.
The film reanimates an enduring ethical dilemma: how should societies reckon with collaborators once authoritarian structures fall? It Was Just an Accident extends Panahi’s sustained exploration of justice. Testimonies from former political prisoners surface, accounts of beatings, humiliation, rape, and ideological fractures, yet the film resists straightforward act of vengeance. Its focus lies less in retribution than in the endurance of memory and the elusiveness of resolution.
It Was Just an Accident bears a certain resemblance to Waiting for Godot, a connection it explicitly acknowledges. In Panahi’s version, however, the elusive Godot is justice, delayed, uncertain, and ultimately combustible. Rather than arriving cold, justice erupts impulsively, first through Vahid’s spontaneous act of violence, then through the increasingly chaotic dynamic as others join his improvised mission, often against his will.
What begins as a process of identification gradually devolves into a comedy of errors, shaped by overlapping testimonies and unresolved grievances. Despite the gravity of its subject matter, Panahi wrote a dialogue-driven comedy that incorporates unexpected moments of slapstick, particularly with the arrival of Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), whose volatility surpasses even Vahid’s.
Panahi demonstrates that even weighty socio-political topics can be approached in a form accessible to broader audiences. By merging a revenge thriller with the sensibility of absurdist comedy, It Was Just an Accident creates space for reflection on the limits of justice and the moral ambiguities that emerge when confronting historical violence. In doing so, the film becomes a meditation on how societies process trauma inflicted by state repression and how can they move on.
Neon will release It Was Just an Accident in the U.S. on October 15.