It Was Just an Accident

Jafar Panahi's first film since his release from an Iranian prison in 2023 won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and it manages the rare trick of being a serious moral inquiry and a genuinely gripping piece of entertainment at the same time. Most of it takes place in a van.

Vahid is a mechanic. A man limps into his workshop and Vahid recognises the sound of the prosthetic leg. He was blindfolded through every interrogation. He never saw his torturer's face. He only heard him. So he abducts the man, whose name is Eghbal, drives him out towards the desert with a shovel in the back, and then falters. What if he's got the wrong man? He starts collecting other former prisoners to identify the captive. A photographer, hauled out of a wedding shoot, climbs into the van with the bride still in her gown. A bookseller. A man with nothing left to lose. Each of them is certain, or nearly certain, or furious at being asked to be certain about anything.

The masterstroke is that Panahi makes an ethical crisis funny. The group bickers constantly. The van breaks down and they have to push it through Tehran traffic with a bound man in the back. The comedy is not decoration. It's the argument. These people are not martyrs or symbols. They are tired, petty, frightened and ordinary, and they have been asked to become executioners, and the sheer banality of their squabbling is what makes the reckoning land like a hammer. Eghbal, meanwhile, protests his innocence with such wounded conviction that the ground never stops shifting under your feet.

The question is put with brutal clarity. If you become the thing that broke you, hasn't the regime just won again? Panahi refuses the easy answer and refuses the consoling one too. A late confrontation, held in one long unbroken take that leaves the actors nowhere to hide, is among the most gripping things in recent world cinema, and the final shot will leave the room silent.

He drew on his own interrogations for this, blindfolded, facing a wall, wondering whether he'd recognise the voice behind him if he ever heard it in the street. He shot in secret, submitted nothing to the censors, backed up material every night, and kept most of his largely non professional cast in the dark about the full story to protect them. France, not Iran, submitted it to the Oscars, where it was nominated for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay. It lost the first to Norway's Sentimental Value.

The verdict: Furious, funny, humane and lean. The crowning work of a director who spent his career making the films his state tried to prevent.